Billy's Halo
Ruth McKernan
Doubleday, GBP16
4/5
THERE'S a certain smugness in reading something that informs as well as entertains - the popularity of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is testament to that. But while this sort of book may be satisfying to read, it's surely one of the hardest to write. How do you go about making science accessible to someone who hasn't been near a petri dish in 20 years?
Bryson has humour and a knack for metaphor on his side - two things that Ruth McKernan also uses to great effect. "Streptococcus is the Julie Burchill of bacteria, " she writes. "Just when you think that every possible vitriolic tack has been taken, lo and behold, out it comes with a new one. And even though you might not appreciate exactly what it does in the world, you can't stop yourself from admiring its versatility and skill."
Unlike Bryson, McKernan is a scientist - a neuroscientist to be precise - who works in drug discovery for a pharmaceutical multinational. Science was an interest she shared with her late father, the eponymous Billy, and it was his illness and death that inspired her to write the book.
The result is an intriguing mix of family memoir and medical fact. She uses each chapter to discuss a different topic - including memory, consciousness, stem cells and genes - in relation to Billy's illness. He contracts septicaemia, then MRSA (if streptococcus is Julie Burchill, then MRSA is Osama bin Laden), and is also suffering from chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CCL) , which eventually leads to his death.
It's a brave undertaking, juxtaposing medical science - which, by its very nature, is sterile and faceless - with that most personal of emotions, grief. The mix makes for a somewhat strange pace - the scientific bits are inevitably harder to wade through - but ultimately each provides relief from the other (at least within the narrative if not in real life). When you find yourself getting bogged down in amygdala, apoptosis and aminobutyric acid, along comes a family snapshot to lighten things up: teenage summers spent manning the pea line for Smedleys in Blairgowrie or the way that Billy would rub his Saturday morning stubble against Ruth's cheek as a child to make her laugh.
It is Ruth's dilemma that is at the heart of the book: is it better or worse to understand what's happening to her father? Is she first and foremost a scientist or a daughter? She knows how the brain works - and does an admirable job of explaining its complexities to the layperson - but that also means she is unable to accept doctors' reassurances at face value and constantly questions their diagnoses and prognoses, scrutinising her father for any sign of decline.
She is determined to care for him, at the expense of her own family life and career, and see that his three wishes are granted before he dies: to revisit his boyhood home in Perthshire and holiday home in Florida, and to see his self-made company reach its silver jubilee.
Ruth also struggles to reconcile what she knows about the human brain - that everything we experience is the result of electrical impulses and chemical reactions - with what she feels. How can the depth of love she has for her father be explained away by neurones and synapses? And where is the essence of the man; how do nature and nurture combine to make him the person he was - and therefore the person she is?
"While Billy lay dying, I sought solace in science, " she says. "But being a scientist spared me nothing; it provided no shield against fate, no defence against grief. Knowing how emotion affects memory could not keep out the vision of those last few breaths. Knowing how genes and development together mould personality could not make me love my father more."
For a scientist McKernan is surprisingly poetic. At times she has a tendency to venture slightly too far into the saccharine, but this is understandable when you consider the enviably close relationship she shared with her father. She also skilfully paints a picture of the man he was in relatively few pages, and you even end up regretting you never met him yourself. Here was no saint, but a bright man with a loving family and a multi-million-pound business. Not bad for a wee boy from Blairgowrie, as he would say.
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