Crabwise Toward Death

THE COST OF LIVING LIKE THIS by James Kennaway. 199 pages. Atheneum. $5.95.

This is a hard little book about dying. A man, fairly young and partly regretful, lives his death neither badly nor well, and for a time his dying makes some difference to a few people. His death is not tragedy or comedy but a process: it will happen, then it is happening, and then, with no decent, grassy place marking the flow of time, it is merely something that happened.

Julian is an English economist in his middle 30s--or has been one, since economics can describe only the past or the future and his attention has been sharpened down to pain's single vivid dimension, the present. He shelters a crab: cancer. The effort of concentrating properly on the crab's requirements makes him weave and shake like a drunk. He is not a drunk; alcohol cannot touch the pain or the concentration that balances it. When the pain becomes so demanding that there is no awareness left to walk with, though, Julian stops at a bar. The barman is deft and quick. To a man who has no past or future to dilute its importance, this skill is wonderful. "The economist wanted to give the barman forty pounds," Kennaway writes. "He was carrying more than that. He wanted to shake the banknotes over the bar and let them drop amongst the tonics and beers like leaves. He put down a pound only and shoved the rest back in some pocket. The pain had been worse than this, a lot worse." Julian is on his way to see his mistress--and that fact is another kind of bad joke. She is a simple, lost, physical girl still in her teens, with no past herself and, so far, little sign of a future. Julian has a wife, not a bad woman or a good one, but disease has pared away his talent for complication; he can no longer thread through the subtle caterings and cozenings of marriage. So, when death comes, it seems to strike a just and dreary balance.

Kennaway's view of life itself is crabbed: the cost of living like this, he suggests, is dying like that. Within its own well-blinkered range, the view is coldly accurate, a gloomy midpoint assessment by a gifted 40-year-old Scots writer (one of whose notable early accomplishments was Tunes of Glory). The gloom is deepened by the reader's knowledge that Kennaway died in an automobile accident late last year, not long after finishing this sixth novel.

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