Time Being by Jude Cook review – a smart existential tale of midlife

A fatal mistake sparks this juicy melodrama, in which a philosophy professor navigates the guilt of being a survivor

What if, battered by cancer and cancer treatment, you decided to end your life? And what if it went wrong and you lived, but a friend died in your place? Would you tell the police the truth? Or reason that there’s no point punishing your grieving, bruised self any further, especially when – in the first bit of good news you’ve had for years – you learn that your treatment may finally be working?

It’s the kind of moral question that London philosophy professor Esther Luck loves throwing at her students. But Jude Cook’s third novel makes the dilemma bracingly personal. As it opens, Esther, who has ovarian cancer, is waiting in a toilet cubicle on the fifth floor of her university building – the only one without CCTV – for the arrival of her dodgy French ex, Michel. He has agreed to shoot through the door and end her misery. But someone else arrives first. Laura is the department’s fragrant superstar, with her BBC presenting gig and handsome barrister husband. She finds an empty stall, Michel gets the wrong door, and Esther is left guilty, panicked and alone on the loo as Laura’s blood pools on the floor.

The setup may feel like a Tarantino subplot, but Cook is here less for the violent drama than the existential questions that follow. His debut, Byron Easy, saw a poet mull over his frustrated life on a train, while its successor, Jacob’s Advice, followed two cousins as they discussed Europe, identity and terrorism. True to form, Time Being does not take long to hunker down with Esther’s thoughts.

Having given a lecture on autopilot and deflected police questions, she sits in her Crouch End flat and walks in the nearby park, alone with her guilt and sorrow. Steroids have left her heavy and listless; radiotherapy has given her permanent nerve damage and agonising cystitis. She is crushed by her menopause and has few friends. Her career once offered fulfilment and security; now the philosophy department faces savage cuts, and an academic who can barely function is right in the firing line.

But the police investigation seems to be going nowhere fast, and chinks of light appear in Esther’s purgatory: good news from her doctor, an unexpected romance, a chance of a book deal. Esther finds herself hammering out Every Grain of Sand, an introduction to philosophy that’s also a memoir. It is, says her agent, “a book I just know women will identify with”. And for all her misery, Esther’s eye for the world is wonderfully vivid throughout. The new year finds “spring crouching under the churned soil”, while on a rare holiday to a country house hotel, Esther opens her eyes to the stars and basks in the universe.

Yet nothing is entirely untainted. One October morning, she visits her mother’s grave under “a blaze of majestic bronze and apricot” foliage to find freshly painted swastikas on the stones of the Jewish cemetery. The police may seem no closer to solving Laura’s murder, but they return every few months to ask leading questions and sit thoughtfully in Esther’s book-lined office. And can the wild, charismatic Michel simply have vanished?

Like any good philosopher, Esther ponders it all: is life “just one damn thing after another”; is she a “temporal husk of flesh, or something else”? She turns to Boethius, Kant, Arendt, Weil and De Beauvoir, but finds little solace. Indeed, Time Being’s philosophical asides end up feeling like its flimsiest part. The rest of the book is better and more focused, and while the juicy melodrama of Laura’s murder and the bleak mundanity of an unhappy life may seem an uncomfortable marriage, Cook ultimately brings his strands together with confidence.

Throughout, it’s the details and feelings that power Time Being: the heavy silence of the clinic’s waiting room, the happy buzz of an unexpected date, the practised rhythm of a lecture. Esther is a fine and acutely observed creation, at times thoroughly sympathetic, at others grimly evasive, and all the more credible for it: you don’t have to like her to share her dread at the trauma she endures and the brutal decisions she faces. The result is a fine portrait of a wounded midlife, as seasons shift and hope and happiness roll by, glorious but fleeting, like clouds in a turbulent sky.

Time Being by Jude Cook is published by Salt (£10.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.