What is it like to be 16 and dying of cancer?
John Green explores this question in this sad, funny and challenging novel ‘The Fault In Our Stars’ in which we are drawn into the world of ‘cancer kid’ Hazel Grace Lancaster suffering from thyroidal cancer ‘with mets in my lungs’. Green was a chaplain in a children’s hospital and was close to young people and their parents as they faced the challenge of terminal illness.
I made a false start to this book. I put it down after the first chapter feeling that there might just be too much pain for me to cope with but when I went back to it I was hooked by the ‘voice’ of Hazel. It is the living voice of a girl caught up in something she cannot control, knowing the anguish her illness is causing her parents, cut off from other young people who are living in the mainstream, finding her friends increasingly among other young cancer sufferers. At one point she reflects on how she has become distant from her former school friends:
‘ . . . three years removed from proper full-time schoolic exposure to my peers, I felt a certain unbridgeable distance between us. I think my school friends wanted to help me through my cancer, but they eventually found out that they couldn’t. For one thing, there was no through.’
It is while Hazel is attending a Support Group that she meets Augustus Waters. He is a charismatic young man who has lost a leg through osteosarcoma and soon he and Hazel are mutually captivated. Augustus habitually carries a packet of cigarettes and will often place one in his mouth without lighting it. He explains to Hazel:
‘They don’t kill you unless you light them. And I’ve never lit one. It’s a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.‘
It is this spirit which we see in Augustus and Hazel and in their relationship which drives the book and carries us through their experiences in what Hazel describes at one point as ‘the Republic of Cancervania.’
This is one of those books which when I finished it I wanted to start again. From resisting it at first go I wanted to stay with it - or rather to stay with Hazel. I don’t know if citizens of the ‘Republic’ will be helped by this book but they may well find emotions and experiences faithfully reflected. Someone once said: ‘A blessed companion is a book’. I feel John Green’s book could be for many in the 'Republic' - or on the periphery - 'a blessed companion.'
