Risking all to help your lover die

Mark Sanderson's Wrong Rooms is his true account of what it was like to fall in love and, all too soon, to lose his lover to cancer. It has this extra twist of the knife, that he was the final instrument of his lover's death, the compassionate pillow-presser who delivered him from the unredeeming horror of his physical suffering. The sum of these experiences tipped him into breakdown and near-madness, a torment both emotional and moral, an inverted climax of misery and self-disgust.

It is a very brave thing to write a book in which you admit you committed euthanasia. It is also brave to write a book in which you almost take a pleasure in presenting yourself as a not particularly nice or interesting person. It is a book which falls almost neatly into two halves. In part one Mark is a "pallid, lonely Englishman out of condition and out of his depth". He works as a freelance writer and TV reviewer. He is gay but nobody loves him.

He hasn't had sex for more than a year. And he has a clipped, staccato prose style which seems to reflect an inner separation and desiccation. There is no flow anywhere in his life.

A lonely hearts ad in Time Out produces Drew, a naive and open young Australian who says more words in his self-introductory letter than he does in the whole of the rest of the book. Grudgingly, to begin with, Mark slowly falls in love with Drew who, unlike him, is not disillusioned and sour, or as he puts it: "He was a kind Christian computer programmer; I was a cynical older hack."

The account of their life together is banal. Where it isn't banal it is unsympathetic, even for a gay-friendly heterosexual reader. There's an account of a visit with Drew to a sauna in Nice that is like a Doré engraving for Dante's Inferno, all writhing bodies and steam. What keeps you going is the end you already know. How is this going to work out?

About halfway through the book the river of their life stops meandering along and tips suddenly over a precipice. Drew has a lump. The lump is malignant - not Aids but melanoma - and they are both desperately rafting on the white water of horror and pain that only ends in death. Please God, I thought, reading the unsparing and ruthlessly detailed accounts of Drew's disintegration, the chemo that makes him sick, the radiation that burns, don't let me get cancer.

The difficulty and distress is relentless. Life, in its guise of one damn thing after another, throws in employment difficulties, housing problems and debt. And there's the promise Drew pulled out of Mark to end it if it became intolerable. It all seemed intolerable to me.

The most powerful moment in the book is the nightmare scene in which Mark tries to stifle Drew, only to have him come powerfully, instinctively, alive. Wrong timing.

Once the right moment has come, Mark becomes, for the only time in the book, in his own words, "a romantic hero, not a neurotic wreck. Someone who could risk their own neck for a dying lover."

But Drew's promise and its fulfilment was a curse. The grief that followed was compounded with a special guilt which, in Mark's words, polluted the mourning process. It seems you can't take life - even the willingly surrendered life of a dying person - without paying consequences.