Julian Barnes

It sounds like a bad or at least derivative novel.

And yet there are promising themes.

Thus, he is meticulous about self-isolation because he doesn't want to die of coronavirus.

He'd much rather die of blood cancer.

It's not just the timescale of it.

Three weeks to a strangulating Covid death, which is very nasty to watch, let alone suffer, according to A&E specialists.

He would rather die of his own disease, thank you very much, not everybody else's.

and without yet knowing its ramifications or the nature of its end, he prefers to have blood cancer.

Is this snobbery?

A little.

He doesn't want lung or liver or bum or whatever, doesn't want bits of him chopped off or out.

It feels a more private, personal form of cancer.

Whether it will feel like this as it progresses is anyone's guess, and he will still be a carcass at the end of it.

assuming the virus doesn't get him first.

Also, it's not the sort of cancer that I can feel responsible for, and therefore guilty about.

Oh, if only I hadn't smoked, drunk so much, eaten so much ultra-processed food.

It's a cancer caused by the body getting old, starting to break down, and turn against its own best interests.

It's a cancer rooted in the universe's utter indifference.

It's random.

It has no significance.