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BY ANTONELLA GAMBOTTO-BURKE

Life in HIs Hands, by Susan Wyndham, published by Picador.

The mythopoeic battle between the late classical concert pianist Aaron McMillan and his anomalous, recurrent brain tumor has become a kind of cottage industry for enterprising members of the Australian media. “Playing for Time,” the 28-minute ABC Australian Story episode detailing his diagnosis (“the cameras captured every moment as the drama unfolded”), is available for $88 on DVD, and McMillan's story has been reworked and rewritten so many times that his memory is in danger of being canonized.

Whilst it is evident that McMillan was both expansive and gifted, this miasma of hyperbole threatens to obscure his life and work. The most ordinary efforts to prolong his brief and dignified existence have been reframed as “a legacy of heroism and tenacity in the face of extreme adversity”, allowing outrageous elitism to pass as compassion. When broadcaster Alan Jones told his friend, journalist Susan Wyndham, that McMillan was “a most gifted pianist and … unfairly overtaken by this scourge,” the implication was that cancer had no business with social parity.

Wyndham reveled in the cultural melodrama, documenting McMillan's prostration, relapse, and eventual death at 30. Curiously, in 2003 she had demonstrated some interest in Alexander Gavrylyuk, another “toweringly talented pianist” who required emergency neurosurgery after his skull was partially crushed in a car accident – but who, unlike McMillan, remains alive.

Recognizing the commercial potential of McMillan's story – which, as Wyndham notes, “formed a neat dramatic arc and [initially] ended in success” - she then took notes as he weakened and died. No longer on the “sidelines”, she felt that she was now part of a bigger history. She claims that when McMillan fell ill, she no longer had the heart to tell his story, but a show of alacrity overcame any reluctance. (“I had been anticipating the news for longer than I wanted to admit,” she reveals after being told of his relapse.) Lest she be maligned as an ambulance chaser, the 50-year-old Wyndham stresses that for research, she “gazed into many brains.” The result? Life in His Hands.

The genuinely intriguing aspects of McMillan's story are either ignored or glossed over by Wyndham, who appears to prefer General Hospital -standard archetypes. At no point are characters permitted behavioral or philosophical latitude; Wyndham's editorial stranglehold ensures that they remain empurpled throughout.

Neurosurgeon Charlie Teo, we learn, has “buckets of confidence” and “work[s] his butt off”. At school, he felt “like a daggy misfit.” His early ambition was “to empty dunnies”. When not “chuck[ing] his motorcycle helmet” in corners or furiously paddling kayak marathons, he sits at his desk with “a grin on his face”, feels like a “superhero” in the operating theatre, or manfully defends himself “against hostile inquisitors.” Genevieve, his long-suffering “Perth-born beauty” of a wife and the mother of his four daughters, is “impressed by how he could come home from a death-defying day and transform into a devoted father.” The rebel Teo's balsawood dialogue? “I'm not sure what type of tumor this is but it looks like a very, very serious one and it's going to have to come out. We're going to operate.”

(The dialogue in general reads like the transcription of an ESL exam. “If there's one man who can remove this tumour,” one neurologist remarks, “I know who it is.”)

McMillan, on the other hand, is depicted in Christlike pastels. The boy who “learned to toot on the recorder” grew into a man who was “always looking dreamily towards the end of the next rainbow.” According to Wyndham, a compound fracture in his foot may just have been his making, as many “great artists have developed their talent after illness cut off other options." Why, even Marcel Proust was “a party boy until chronic asthma kept him indoors”. Critically, McMillan was “an enigma, even to his intimates”, and a “textbook Aquarian [who] could have been the model for Linda Goodman's description in her astrology classic, Sun Signs , which begins: ‘Lots of people like rainbows … but the Aquarian is ahead of everybody. He lives on one.'”

Wyndham's focus is, for the greater part, irrelevant. Rather than depicting the Australian neurosurgical community as a collective of squeamish little prigs (“Many of them talk about neurosurgery as a club that only admits members with the right image,” “they consider [publicity] to be in bad taste,” etc.), Wyndham could have addressed the rigorous medical training that conditions surgeons to function in intolerable situations.

Straight 12-hour stretches are not unusual, consciousness of accountability is unrelenting, and precision is demanded even after minimal sleep. Many surgeons survive on adrenaline. All natural emotional impulses must conform to the prescribed role. The pressure shows in the statistics: in the medical community, surgeons are the most likely to capitulate to alcoholism, drug abuse, divorce and suicide. Their families rarely see them. These complications are generally ignored by medical bodies, ostensibly because of the difficulty of knowing whether the dysfunction stems from the work or whether the work attracts those predisposed to dysfunction. Craig A. Miller, author of The Making of a Surgeon in the 21 st Century , elegantly documents the harshness of residency programs, whose standards are derived from an antiquated - and draconian - surgical era. The goal, he states, is to produce “quasi-military, anal-retentive surgical hard asses”; instead, residents are “entirely devoid of spirit, wandering the wards in a sleep-deprived haze.”

The real story of McMillan and Teo – and one Wyndham is incapable of writing - is a metaphor: the collaboration of art and science against the universal adversary, death.

Widely perceived as antagonistic or rival forces, art – in this case, music - and science are, in fact, commensurate in important respects – namely, as neurobiologist Gunther S. Stent stated, that both endeavor to discover and communicate truths about the world. The late philosopher Leonard B. Meyer preferred to note the crucial difference: music is composed, but the relationships explained by scientific theory preexist the theory. Meyer pointed out that the structure of the DNA molecule was what it was before Watson and Crick formulated a theory of its structure. They did not create its structure, but discovered it – or, to credit them with some creativity, composed a theory to explain it - but the nature of the relationships by which the molecule is defined remains unaffected.

Even in cases where music is representational rather than presentational, it is a concrete example of relationships rather than an abstraction about relationships, which is why, in part, relationships between musicians and neuroscientists remain intriguing. (Keith Richards now shares a house with his neurosurgeon.) Musicians, as a class, may have little interest in neuroscientists outside their application, but those who work with the brain's architecture are captivated by musicians because musical practice literally changes the brain; as neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin noted, music coordinates more disparate parts of the brain than almost anything else. And while Teo may have been fascinated by McMillan for other reasons, this was undoubtedly a factor.

In essence, the tension between the two disciplines – an example of Cartesian duality - reflects our culture's bumpy perceptual shifts regarding the definition of self: are we spirit, matter, or both? There is also the professional overlap to consider. Whilst musicians, as a class, have little interest in neurosurgeons outside their immediate application, those who work with the architecture of the brain are captivated by musicians because musical practice changes the brain. As neuroscientist Professor Daniel J. Levitin notes, music coordinates more disparate parts of the brain than almost anything else.

Wyndham not only appears to have difficulty describing medical procedures, but with compound and complex sentence construction. The book is littered with confused descriptions. Of a “glamorous Qantas stewardess”, she writes: “A neurologist she found through the Yellow Pages diagnosed a tumour on her pineal gland, which the French philosopher Rene Descartes pinpointed as the seat of consciousness, and modern medicine knows as the manufacturer of melatonin and controller of the body's circadian rhythms, a vulnerable function in flight crews.”

Really? Descartes identified the tumour on a stewardess' pineal gland as the seat of consciousness?

Teo, we learn, “plays the bagpipes dressed in a kilt.” (The bagpipes wore a kilt?) He “left the little fibro house … that he had renovated with his own hands for the wealthy suburbs of Dallas .” (Teo renovated his house for the wealthy suburbs of Dallas?) No matter: Teo was “a Chinese man with an Australian accent in a kilt playing bagpipes.” (In addition to playing kilt-wearing bagpipes, it seems Teo was accompanied by an Australian accent clad in a bagpipe-playing kilt.) “Charlie,” she adds, “had sucked away an area of brain that destroyed any vestige of movement and sensation in his left leg.” (Abstaining from all inquiry into Teo's brain-sucking prowess: exactly which part of the brain destroys movement and sensation in the left leg? And is there a corresponding area that destroys movement and sensation in the right leg?)

Happily, the book eventually ends. McMillan “vacate[s] his gaunt, beautiful young body,” visitors “trembl[e] with sobs,” and Wyndham “howl[s] … for his suffering, his bravery and his unfulfilled hopes, and for the inexorable march of death into all our lives.” After the funeral – at which “even Alan Jones wept” (irrefutable evidence of the event's supranormal gravitas) – McMillan's bereaved mother, Gail, “led a conga line … waving sparklers and singing ‘Happy Birthday' to her husband.”

A certain chilling pragmatism occasionally makes itself known in the arrondissement of cliché that is Wyndham's mind. “[T]here are,” she writes, quoting Schubert, “worse things that can happen to an artist than to die young.” She actually admits entertaining “the uncomfortable suspicion that a quick death five years before might have been preferable,” and feels “exhausted relief” when McMillan's “struggle” ends. In the end, perhaps, he “really was meant to have a fleeting, Peter Pan life.”

The quadraphonic mediocrity of Wyndham's closing words? “The clouds evaporated … Aaron would have smiled.”

*Originally published in The South China Morning Post