Let Go My Hand

Edward Docx

Picador, £16.99

Review by Russell Leadbetter

LARRY Lasker was an esteemed, brilliant academic, formerly director of studies in English Literature at University College London. He was sufficiently well-connected to be on nodding terms with Harold Pinter, and to have once dined in the company of Tony Blair and some 50 other guests. But now he has been diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease, and, having pondered his inescapable fate, has decided to embark on one final journey, to Zurich, in the company of his youngest son, Louis.

His intention, once there, is to end his life in what Louis, who narrates the novel, terms “the little blue house of death” run by Dignitas. It’s not suicide, the son has to say to others, more than once. It’s assisted dying.

Rather than flying to Zurich, father and son are making the journey – for reasons that become clear – in a ragged old VW camper van. In time, they are joined by Louis’s older twin half-brothers, Ralph and Jack, Larry’s sons from his first marriage. And neither of them has quite forgiven Larry for the way he behaved in that marriage.

What must it be like to accompany someone you love on a journey such as this? Do you try to argue him out of it, do you hope he will at some point change his mind, do you seek to come to terms with it, recognising that he is terminally ill and that after all it is his right to end his life as he wishes? All of this and more is explored in Docx’s deeply moving novel.

Larry and Lou, father and son, have travelled all over Europe together. They have an unshakeable bond – though perhaps, Lou concedes, this is a result of the animosity with Ralph and Jack. On the ferry to France, he spots his father reading. “…It’s as though”, he writes, “I can feel my heart’s fist uncurling and reaching out towards him like those Michelangelo fingers he took me to see one time in the Vatican when I was too young to care or notice and only wanted ice cream”. The disease has taken its toll on the older man, rendered him physically frail. As the two place their arms on each other’s shoulders, Lou recognises that it is “so strange and alien and intimate and close … to have the fact of Dad’s real living body leaning on me, to feel his breath, his weight, his pulse and the pressure on my arm caused by the rhythm of his shuffle, which is both the rhythm of his disease and the rhythm of his being”.

The pace quickens and the mood changes with the arrival of Lou’s brothers. Both have their own decided views of their father’s decision to end his life. Ralph, who works as a successful puppeteer in a Berlin theatre, is especially caustic and lethally articulate. And as the VW van makes its way across the Continent, via visits to Palaeolithic cave paintings and a rather fine restaurant, four passengers bicker, and joke, and eat croissants, and explore essential truths in the process of becoming re-acquainted with one another, all the while addressing the issue that has brought them here: is Larry entitled to insist that he will keep his appointment in the little blue house of death?

Docx, whose second novel, Self Help, reached the Booker shortlist in 2007, has a fine ear for convincing dialogue and for lovely little descriptive phrases: “black birds rise from the roadside like ashes scattered into the wind”, for example. The bond between Lou and his older brothers is beautifully handled. There are, from time to time, some metaphors and jokes that are slightly overdone, but there is also a very funny scene involving Jack’s young children in the family bathroom.

The further you burrow into the novel, you, much like the three brothers, wonder if Larry will go through with his decision. But it is hard to lose sight of his point of view. “My choices,” he tells his sons, “are to go through with this and die before it gets worse. And it will get worse. Or not to go through with it – and inflict suffering on me – and on you – and then die anyway”. Phrases such as this, as well as Lou’s own conflicting emotions on the subject, convey with depth and compassion the impact that decisions like Larry’s will have on partners and on sons and daughters. Within two hours of finishing this book, I read a news story about a man who has primary progressive multiple sclerosis and who is now to travel to Zurich to end his life. One quote, from the Dignity in Dying Scotland organisation, stood out: every two weeks, someone from Britain travels to Dignitas for an assisted death.