Two thousand years ago, a provincial Roman governor asked a question that haunts us to this day. Haunts us, in fact, these days more than ever: “What is truth?”
Everything is true, says Roopa Farooki in this searing memoir about working on the front lines of the NHS during the early days of the pandemic. Indeed, Farooki repeats this several times, and when a phrase appears in a book’s title, epigraph and final sentence, you get the sense the author wants you to take note.
But firstly: yes, this book is about Covid. You may be thinking: would I rather have Covid than read another hot take on Covid? You may also be thinking: must another doctor really pick up the pen? You may even be thinking: should I still be reading this review?
Well, in this pen-wielding doctor’s opinion, long may Dr Farooki write, if she continues to write like this: “Her small body is gift-wrapped for God, in blank white cloth, boxed up and buried under great clots of mud.” This sentence – so clean, clear, precise – appears within the first few pages of a harrowing prologue about the death of Farooki’s sister weeks before the pandemic was announced. It’s an accurate portent of the quality of writing to come.
That death should make its bow so early in a pandemic memoir is perhaps unsurprising. As Farooki writes later, “Death is all around. It’s everywhere, and the air is constantly crackling with the expired electricity of it.” It may not be surprising, but it is a solace that in Farooki’s hands death and grief will be dealt with upfront and unflinchingly.
Entertaining guide
One is reminded of another prologue, from Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, wherein a mother forlorn from Stalinist terror asks the poet: “‘Can you describe this?’/ And I said:/ ‘I can.’/ Then something like a fleeting smile passed over what once had been her face.”
Farooki structures her memoir as a quasi-epistolary account of the first 40 days of the first lockdown. The narrative is addressed to herself and presented as contemporaneous, across 24 chapters that vary in length and depth. She proves an insightful and entertaining guide, and though the tone becomes increasingly political and polemical, her observations are leavened with an attractive blend of wit, self-awareness and moral seriousness:
“It’s day 20 of lockdown, and you can’t understand the lack of anger . . . You don’t understand how 10,000 dead isn’t written in big, blood-red letters everywhere . . . The internet is more interested in Priti Patel’s eyebrows than her errors. They ask, ‘How did she get them done so neatly in lockdown?’ You want to ask, ‘How come she can’t count?’”
The memoir’s political angle is easiest to grasp. Farooki provides a clarion reminder of how the fears and risks faced by frontline workers were heightened by governmental incompetence and bureaucratic callousness. PPE shortages, inappropriate redeployments to understaffed ICUs, unnecessary deaths of patients and (disproportionately BAME [black, Asian and minority ethnic]) healthcare workers all feature. And then: “they’re saying that 56-hour weeks are not unacceptable. That weasel double negative.” All this will sound familiar to anyone who has worked in the all-too-often weaselly HSE.
It is hard not to side with Farooki in feeling humourless about a situation/society where “the 1 per cent shrugs and dies obligingly, like it’s impolite to do otherwise, because they don’t want to be a strain on the health services”.
Whistleblowing exposé
Now, if a whistleblowing exposé was Farooki’s only angle, then this memoir and her recurring refrain that “Everything is True” could be neatly labelled “justifiable outrage” and filed in the “post-truth politics” drawer of our brains for when some Covidiot bandies the word “hoax” around. But this is not the only angle. Some of the memoir’s most interesting and stirring moments are the softer ones, happening in the wings while the diva virus careens monstrously centre stage.
Take, for example, the valuable light Farooki shines on the difficulties sustaining esprit de corps on the home front, with “scattering and reforming and never completed” domestic tasks and fretting about feeding her four children fish fingers when she’s not fretting about infecting them. (Maybe Mondays should have been Clap for Our Mothers? Maybe it should still be?) And for all the fear and drama on the front line, Farooki’s fraught glimpses of a marriage under strain leave some of the deepest marks.
The final thing to say about this memoir is that it is haunted. Without giving too much away, this haunting breaks something open within Farooki and leads to genuine insight on love, grief and what truly matters. One suspects the reader, too, may be moved in unexpected ways by a transference of this liminal energy; perhaps this is the cost of admission for a book crackling with “expired electricity”.
“The sound of breaking hearts is deafening,” Farooki writes. The real distinction of this memoir is how she transmutes this singular sound into a something our ears can bear to hear, something we need to hear, into song. The refrain? “Everything matters. Everything is True.”
