tl;dr

Gorgeous prose, some fascinating historical tangents but the concerns and challenges that face our narrator bored me to tears.

opening remarks

Sight by Jessie Greengrass has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.  I was going to read it anyway.  So, who’s the smart one now!!!!

knee-jerk observations

Our narrator reflects sadly on the decline of her mother, beautifully juxtaposed against the literal scoring of memory into the walls and floors of a home.

I’m fascinated by how the novel, at this early stage, alternates between our protagonist’s deeply personal concerns – whether she should have another child, whether she provided her mother decent health care during her mother’s final days – and a history lesson on Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, the bloke who discovered X-rays.  What connects these things isn’t apparent at the moment, but the shift between the personal and the historical is intriguing.

So that’s why it’s called an X-Ray! I had no idea.  I mean I could have Googled the answer – I just did, and it took nine seconds to verify the historical account below – but it’s not until this moment that I realised I’ve always wanted to know.

The prose is beautiful, but I wonder if it needs a little more roughness around the edges, scrub away some of that polish.  I can appreciate our character’s doubts about whether to have a child, especially since she continues to mourn her mother.  I can recognise the intense love she has for her husband, particularly after he provides our narrator with the alone time she needs to reflect, to make sense of her doubts, and yet I’m struggling to empathise, to establish an emotional bond.

Having said that, the intense burst of prose, of which below is an excerpt, describing our protagonist’s brain-wrenching migraines, is punch in your gut marvellous.  While my migraines are nowhere near as painful, I also experience that weird sense of euphoria after an attack.

I love that, “… quibbling at the bill.”

I’ve reached part two of Sight, and my attention is drifting.  The one aspect of the book that I did find compelling – the story of Rontgen’s discovery – has been replaced by flashbacks to our protagonist’s childhood when she used to spend summers with her therapist grandmother, Doctor K.  There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with these recollections; there’s just nothing compelling about them either.  In particular, I’m frustrated with lengthy passages like this, the therapist navel-gazing coupled with the beautifully crafted but long, winding and never-ending sentences.

Doctor K’s interest in psychoanalysis prompts our protagonist to detail Freud’s account of a four-year-old boy, “Little Hans.” And suddenly I’m interested, curiosity piqued.

Greengrass depiction of Freud’s relationship with his daughter Anna is fantastic.  It is strange that the historical stuff is so much more compelling than our protagonist’s own story – her attachment to her grandmother, mother and husband.

In the third part of the novel, the story alternates between our protagonist’s pregnancy and the life and times of 18th Century artist Jan van Rymsdyk.  You can take a guess which narrative is keeping me engaged.

We’ve now moved onto 18th Century surgeon John Hunter who had a penchant for cutting up corpses and figuring out how their insides worked.  He was apparently influential in improving the conditions for battlefield medicine.

The Gist Of It

I have a suspicion that I’m going to be on the wrong side of history with this novel.  It’s not just the positive reviews the book has garnered; I have a hunch that Sight will feature on the long and shortlists of numerous literary awards – as already evidenced by the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

The novel, though, didn’t work for me at all.  Yes, I can admire the prose.  It is truly stunning at times.  I also genuinely enjoyed and was engrossed in the historical tangents, but Greengrass’ ruminations on pregnancy, on death, on therapy, on the bond between a mother and a daughter, never made much of an impression.  Maybe it’s because I’m a bloke.  I note that Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones, a book I adored, is also meditative in structure, expressed as a single sentence, but I found the male concerns of McCormack’s protagonist far more engaging.  It also might be that Greengrass maintains this single tone throughout the novel.  Her character is in a permanent state of doubt, guilt and worry, only broken up by those magnificent tangents into the past.  There’s no humour here.  No joy.  No sense that life is anything more than a series of paralysing choices.  I don’t expect a laugh a minute, but even the dourest of reflections has a tinge of black humour.  I only finished Sight because I wanted to know more about Röntgen, Freud and Hunter.  On those topics her character writes with a great deal of passion and intellectual curiosity, and yet none of that is present when she meditates about her own life.

As I say above, I’m sure to be a minority view about this novel.  The prose is undoubtedly gorgeous., and if you’re patient (I wasn’t) there’s ample opportunity to admire Greengrass’ use of language.  For me, though, I wish Greengrass had written about the history of X-Rays or the autopsies, dissections and vivisections of the 18th Century because that’s some fascinating shit right there.