'By Thess Things Men Live' - Robert Ellal (e-book) 

Bob Ellal’s ‘By These Things Men Live’ comes with a sucker punch in the final chapter (no, he doesn’t snuff it) but I shall declare my conclusion immediately. It is exquisite.

It plays towards one of my prejudices and against another.

The one it plays towards is my preference for novellas. You probably know the reply of the writer who was asked why his book had come in at seven hundred pages – “Because I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.” Bob did have time and it shows. He obviously even had time to really screw it up, but he didn’t – he polished it to a diamond instead, a blood diamond.

The prejudice he has confounded is my expectation of what a chemo-and-tell autobiography might play like. I was expecting a lot of trauma, a lot of drama, tears, emotions tumbling off the shelf, and long, lingering, mawkish thank yous to anyone and everyone he had ever met amid his endeavours to overcome his fate. While I would have been whole-heartedly sympathetic to anybody who had to go through that lot, this would have been a book I could have put down, and would have put down, easily.

Instead, Bob has produced a literary and personal gem which is intuitively plotted with the surefooted stealth of fiction, pitch-perfect in tone, sinuous of language and not in the least repetitive for the tale of his having to overcome cancer four times over. ‘And again, and again and again’ could have constituted a death knell if not for him at least for his book, but it rather flows like a tragic boat cascading down a river of toxic chemistry.

As someone who is close-to-violently opposed to the conventional treatment of cancer, I had two reactions. One was how incredibly heroic Corporate Bob had been without his ever having admitted it. The other was “what an absolute bloody idiot to fall for all that crap four times over.”

Astonishingly, Bob probably agrees with me.

The master-stroke, which could have been pretentiously disastrous, was for Bob to envisage himself as the early English hero Beowulf contending a prowling and invincible monster. Beowulf?

He doesn’t turn up so often in celebrity tales. Well, should you have any doubts, Beowulf is the man, the apposite analogy for Bob’s plight. He really was facing a writhing beast with razor claws, thumping tail and sulphurous breath, and that beast was himself.

Believe me, Bob is an extraordinary man, and this is an extraordinary book. I don’t know how you get hold of it, but if I had to I would crawl on my knees all the way from Belgium to California to find out. (Tim Roux).