Sight
By Jessie Greengrass
John Murray, 198pp
How does a woman find the courage to have a child? In Jessie Greengrass' intelligent debut novel, "Sight," she immerses herself in medical history, reading about Wilhelm Rontgen's discovery of the X-ray, an early Caesarean section by 18th-century surgeon John Hunter, and Sigmund Freud's analysis of the mind. In short, she seeks revelation.
Scientific discovery and motherhood may seem like an odd pairing for fiction, but in Greengrass' skillful hands they reflect something profound about each other, each episode circling around ideas of knowledge and understanding, alluding to a deeper question of whether we can ever really know another person, even if we bear them within our own body.
The narrator -- who never offers her name, as though she is simply telling these stories to herself -- recounts potted histories of medical science with a generous measure of imagination and human feeling, and knits them between her own memories: of her mother's slow decline toward death years earlier, and the childhood summers spent with her psychoanalyst grandmother near Hampstead Heath in London.
These personal sections have the most power as she evokes the intricacies of familial love. But the domestic features large throughout: She places men like Freud and Hunter and Rontgen within their families, imagining the soil from which their discoveries grew. A young Anna Freud listens quietly to her father's meetings in a Viennese drawing room; Rontgen brings his wife Bertha to his lab, where she is shaken by seeing an X-ray of the bones in her hand:
"-- It is, she said -- like seeing my own death."
For the narrator and other characters, curiosity, awe and even fear make bodies and minds otherworldly. After becoming pregnant, the narrator places a grainy image taken by the Huygens probe of the Saturnian moon Titan next to an ultrasound photo of the child inside her own body, and looking at both of them, feels "the same: a kind of plunging incomprehension, an absolute inability to make sense."
In another moment, in which men gather to observe Hunter's extraordinary attempt to rescue a child from its mother's body, she wonders whether there would have been "an atmosphere close to joy ... as two and a half centuries later another group would gather to wait for the result of the Huygens probe, those first pictures of a strange moon … knowledge delivered into light and them as witnesses."
Mystery and revelation are the push and pull of each narrative. But seeing does not necessarily bring understanding, nor relief from life's complications. Reading about Freud's analysis of "Little Hans," a child whose fear of leaving the house is, he is told, really a fear of his father, the narrator imagines "the horror of it: to be made to feel in ignorance of oneself."
Greengrass carries complex themes deftly through prose that is both languid and lucid, rich yet sharply descriptive. Embracing the complexity of human experience, she has produced a novel full of lines that ask to be savored for their brilliance or how perfectly they capture a subtlety of feeling. Particularly remarkable is the passage about the death of the narrator's mother for its portrayal of unrecognized grief and how letting a parent go doesn't necessarily look the way we expect.
A tenderly told story of standing on the edge of change, this novel sits in the tension between uncertainty and understanding, like life itself -- and maybe that's the point.
-- By Kiri Falls
Japan News Staff Writer
Maruzen price: 1,952 yen plus tax
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