SOURCE: “The Victims,” in New Statesman, September 18, 1981, p. 26.

In the following excerpt, Poole praises the dignity and skill with which Johnston portrays death and illness in The Christmas Tree.

Susan Sontag, in Illness as Metaphor, described illness as the ‘night-side of life.’ She went on to quote the American psychiatrist Karl Menninger: ‘Illness is in part what the world has done to a victim, but in larger part it is what the victim has done with his world and with himself.’ This existential understanding opens up a bleak perspective. Illness becomes a sort of contemporary equivalent of the mystic's dark night of the soul, a condition that calls everything into question.

This week's batch of fiction sees two very different novelists attempting to explore illness as a metaphor for change, revaluation and, paradoxically, renewal. As the dying cancer victim in Jennifer Johnston's The Christmas Tree puts it, ‘there...