Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces

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In essence, it is a way of rebooting the body’s faulty immune system, like a computer being turned on and off again. As he says to his students at the end of his introductory lecture at the beginning of each academic year, literature is not a mirror, rather it is ‘a lens we could use to refocus our understanding of the world. Finally, out of the tragedy of a randomly afflicted life, comes life-affirming laughter, a humanity, courageous but not ostentatious, and a defiant Nietzschean gaiety. His symptoms – the struggle to get out of a hot bath; the feeling, after a long walk, that his legs could no longer carry him – had hitherto been more bothersome than distressing or painful.

As well as the medical texts he read, he became fascinated by novels and plays in which serious illness plays a major part.But now he began to see them as part of a sinister jigsaw: a fiendish puzzle that would, he soon gathered, forever remain unsolvable. But better wilful legs (and knee pads) than some other things: “The less the body works, the more you appreciate any bit that still does.

That in turn suggests that life, even for those who feel well, is something we have to navigate and negotiate, and this is where elements of autobiography enter welcomely in - above all, Douglas-Fairhurst's faith in books and the imagination as sustaining presences. And there is mischievous laughter breezing throughout the book, forbidding any maudlin false sentiment. What I needed was laughter,’ Douglas-Fairhurst says, and later, ‘the worst was not, so long as I could still look at it with a comic squint. It wasn’t clear the disease definitely would get worse, or how quickly it would if it did,” he says, handing me a slice of homemade fruit cake. In his new book, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst likens his diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 2017 to the opening of a trapdoor on which he unfortunately happened to be standing “like Wile E Coyote” at the precise moment when the lever operating it was pulled.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and an award-wining biographer and critic. His books include Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist , which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland , which was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award, and The Turning Point: A Year that Changed Dickens and the World . But even as he read, and took solace in that reading, there was no ignoring the fact that his own disease was developing rapidly, symptoms that had previously been content to remain in the background now thrusting themselves wholeheartedly upon him. Only some days later did he tell his family, and his partner, M, to whom Metamorphosis is dedicated: “We don’t live together, so I had some breathing space.

It allows you a critical vantage point, enabling you to understand the illness from the inside and the outside simultaneously. While many patients have had to travel abroad (often to Mexico) to receive this radical treatment, he discovered that AHSCT trials were being conducted in London, for which, following tests, he turned out to be eligible. His books include Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland, which was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award, and The Turning Point: A Year that Changed Dickens and the World. An account of its author’s experiences of what was then known as “disseminated sclerosis” – Cummings died the year it came out, aged just 30 – it had a powerful effect on Douglas-Fairhurst, one he describes compellingly in Metamorphosis.

The Journal of a Disappointed Manis a memoir, first published in 1919, by the naturalist Bruce Cummings under the pseudonym WNP Barbellion.

AHSCT cannot repair existing damage to the brain and spinal cord, but up to 70% of patients with primary progressive MS who undergo it are able to halt the disease’s development. The book ought to be gruelling and it doesn’t shrink from candour about the trials of MS – the pain, anxiety, shame and self-pity, and the thoughts of ending them at Dignitas.

Words stop working, and it is hard to make a joke when one is afraid of making some ghastly breach of taste, like farting in church.