Michael Joseph, part of Penguin Random House group, Australia, 2024
Cover design Debra Billson © Penguin Random House Australia P/L
Cover illustration The Laundry Room
This is a book about love, grief, ageing, dementia and aged care – perhaps not usually the stuff matched with fart joke humour and yet here it is and done with finesse and charm.
This debut work by Anna Johnston surely established her as a storyteller par excellence, a writer with the capacity to make us laugh and cry on the same page.
A case of mistaken identity allows the nearly destitute hero of our story Frederick Fife to begin a new life as aged care resident Bernard Greer. This happens by sheer mischance, an encounter with seagulls and a runaway wheelchair causing the dead man to disappear down river for most of the story.
Ironically, it is because Frederick is trying to help the other man by wheeling him back to the care home excursion group; Fred is a natural born helper, recently widowed after the death from cancer of his beloved wife, Dawn.
It was, in fact, her cancer treatment that ruined him financially as well as thrusting him into the deepest grief, and so the opportunity to be housed and fed, albeit in the role of an incontinent aged care patient suffering from dementia, is too tempting to pass up.
Mind you, Fred makes a valiant effort to explain that he is not Bernard but as is sadly sometimes the way of aged care, he is not listened to. His claims are brushed aside and assumed to be part of his illness and decline.
Meanwhile, Fred gets to know his fellow residents and the staff and takes a keen interest in their welfare. He strikes up a particularly close and special friendship with Albert, a fellow resident, and Albert’s wife Val who lives in the outside world alone now, visiting her beloved in times of both his lucidity and his confusion.
A series of challenges to Fred’s secure identity as Bernard carry the story on its light-hearted path. However, in the course of the humorous incidents and misadventures, we also encounter people and are privy to situations that hold the serious content of this story – the half life of the aforementioned Val and Albert, the dilemma and bitterness of estranged families, the devastating effects of overwork on stressed nursing staff, financial constraints that determine the level of care a person can enjoy, homeless and its many causes.
This novel was born from the author’s love for her grandfather and the real-life love translates seamlessly onto the page. It’s palpable. Anna Johnston clearly demonstrates her understanding and experience of the ups and downs of ageing and aged care. We know she cares deeply about the people of her fiction, their grief and loss. We also know how much she respects them, recognising who they once were and still are beneath the crumbling veneer of ageing. It’s very real.
She shies away from nothing. She’s happy to make us laugh uncomfortably about incontinence as Fred is forced to wear Bernard’s brown stained underpants. Fred farts his way through many a situation and we also giggle at this schoolboy humour, just as we cringe at the thought of Fred having to wet his padded pants to convince the nurse that all is as normal.
Any suspicion that Fred might not be all he says he is can be fairly easily diverted – in any case the staff are too over-worked to dwell long on such niggling doubts. That he is willing to take Bernard’s medication with its unpleasant side effects is another demonstration of the parlous state of Fred’s life before he became Bernard.
Without spoiling the necessary secrets of plot, it is important to say that love and reconciliation are what remain after we leave the pages of this book. Fred’s unswerving kindness and his own need for love and human touch lead him and us to the satisfying ‘happy ending’.
That there are just as many unhappy endings in this situation is not lost on us. But the wisdom of realism cannot dampen the flush of our idealism and emotion. Like Fred, we know that the truth really does set us free.
Thank you to Penguin Random House for my review copy and to Anna for speaking with me about this charming story and the serious issues underlying it which led to her writing it.