Shelf Life

MY SISTER’S KEEPER
By Jodi Picoult
Hodder & Stoughton
417 pages. £6.99

I’d seen the soppy cover of this best seller in the window of W.H. Smiths months ago and decided it was definitely not a book I wanted to read. But Jodi Picoult kept cropping up and when the book was discussed on Radio 4 my intellectual snobbery crumbled. I bought a copy and got stuck in.

The story is told in the first person by different characters; at the centre is Anna, a 13-year-old who was selected as an embryo because she was a genetic match for her sister. Kate, three years older, suffers from an acute form of leukaemia, and it is Anna’s umbilical cord cells, bone marrow, and granulocytes which put her into remission. We join the story when Anna walks into a lawyer’s office and announces that she wants to sue her parents for ‘medical emancipation’, that is that she would be free to choose or deny future donations. Kate’s kidneys are failing and her only hope, an outside chance, is a transplant from Anna. So we are introduced to members of the family, and those involved in the case, as they tell their own thoughts and relate events, moving back and forward in time.

Behind the melodrama

After a few pages I wondered whether I’d make it to the end. It is badly written, with nonsensical similes all over the place and one-liners so gut wrenching they become funny. The characters too often fall into stereotypes or are under realised: Anna’s lawyer, Campbell, had his heart broken as a student and now lives a sterile, cynical existence (of course his long lost love turns up later on...), Anna’s father is a fire fighter, in the business of rescuing people. And, as one last thing, the plot is pretty contrived too. Against all the odds, though, as I persevered I did find myself gripped by the genuine dilemmas and real suffering the book presents. Jodi Picoult has done her research, and the details of treatment, symptoms and side effects force the reader to sympathise with the family consumed by this trauma. Behind the melodrama there is a story here which is affecting and full of agonising tensions; this is why the book has been so popular.

At the shallow end

We are caused to consider the value of life, not only Kate’s as she goes in and out of hospital, but the value of her sister’s, brother’s and parents’ as they are churned up and consumed by caring for Kate. These questions of course connect with so many stories in the newspapers about sick children and increasingly sophisticated cures, but they connect, too, to the biggest story of all. For Kate to live, Anna must give her blood, and now her kidney, while Anna’s parents give everything. Again and again in fiction the idea of self-sacrifice is found; writers can’t help but echo the music of the cross, just as they also unwittingly reveal the inability of man to save himself. Of course, the irony is that the world of My Sister’s Keeper is sealed; the characters don’t cry out to God, they don’t ask or expect him to intervene. Medicine and human love are the only possible saviours and, of course, they are woefully weak; any triumphs are triumphs of coincidence and the human spirit. That kind of suffering and fortitude make an acceptable, but ultimately shallow story. In contrast, I have seen a Christian family going through diagnosis and then treatment for childhood leukaemia. And though I know of many tears, I see in them a depth of grace and peace which astounds me.

Looking at secular books

Behind the melodrama

At the shallow end

Sarah Allen

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