Death comes for us all. Mercury Under My Tongue, the new novel from Governor General’s Award-winning Quebec writer Sylvain Trudel, tackles this inevitability head-on, through the eyes of an atheistic teenage narrator spending his final days in a cancer ward as best he can. Trudel follows this first-person narrative through to its inevitable end.

Frederick Langlois, the 17-year-old narrator, finds the whole situation terribly unfair, though he accepts his position with as much grace as possible. Like any sensitive adolescent, Langlois writes poetry and muses philosophically about the meaning of life. Reading Langlois’s poetry is very much like reading Zen koans; they pop up whenever he feels the need to make a strong point. (“Happy is he who steps outside/ in the way we enter a church.”)

At first, readers may find themselves wondering what a self-described “asshole” like Langlois has to say about life. As he fluctuates between hatred for the superstitions of the Catholic Church in which he was raised and a mystic’s embrace of all of life’s torments, it becomes clear that his philosophical and religious ramblings are a sustained search for the perfect final words. Knowing that his hourglass is swiftly running out of sand, and unsure whether to laugh or cry, Langlois continually manipulates readers’ feelings with his vivid descriptions of the hospital and its residents and his biting commentaries, though he never asks for pity.

People often believe that the deaths of young people are more terrible than the deaths of those who have lived full lives. Trudel’s young narrator tries this theme on for size, spins it about like a pencil in his eager writing hand, and ultimately does his best to comfort his family before he departs. He tries to explain his feelings and the reasons behind his seemingly absurd behaviour in his journal – the book we are reading one year after his demise.

While it is nothing new for a character to face death in hospital or to write from beyond the grave, Trudel’s approach remains fresh from beginning to end because of Langlois’s own creed of honesty at all costs.