The Telegraph, Saturday, 27 January 2007
Doors of misperception – Lionel Shriver applauds a masterpiece of interlinked storytelling.
Starting with David Mitchell’s artful Ghostwritten in 1999,
casting novels as disparate stories that somehow interlock has travelled from
innovation to fad. Nevertheless, any vogue can be done well or badly, and in
her fourth novel Patricia Ferguson has executed this form with consummate skill.
The wonderfully titled Peripheral Vision tells three tales whose plots
delicately interconnect, but whose unity derives more from sensibility than
clever authorial manipulations of coincidences. All three are love stories
in their way – as perhaps, most good stories are, involving thwarted,
misdirected, or misunderstood passions, this narrative trio portrays a host
of unnecessary suffering – as perhaps most good stories do.
In the 1950s, Iris is a sweet, fragile fantasist traumatised in childhood by
the war, and in love with Rob. Her lowly social pedigree doesn’t impress
her would-be mother-in-law, who mentions pointedly to her son that a valuable
knick-knack went missing right after Iris’s introductory visit. The imputed
thievery will have fateful consequences. In truth, the “netsuke pig” was
pinched as a sentimental keepsake by the seemingly stoic housekeeper Meadows,
who employers “appreciated her efficiency, and largely failed to notice
that she was human. This was hardly surprising, when Meadows herself seemed
unaware of it too.” Yet Meadows is in love with the imperious matriarch
of the house, the only person living who has ever shown her affection – or
so she imagines – despite the fact that she will be paid the same pocket-money
wages for 25 years.
Likewise in the 1950s, Ruby is a mother traumatised by her young son’s
household accident, which has left him blinded in one eye and has blighted
her adoration for the boy, who is no longer perfect. Convinced that George’s
accident was all her fault, Ruby withdraws from her husband, refusing his gestures
of affection as undeserved. (The scene in which she throws the new dress he
has painstakingly picked out for her in a single liquid motion into the fire
in her cooker is marvellous.) Like the misattributed theft of the netsuke
pig, the regular arrival of poison-pen letters has fateful consequences.
In the mid-1990s, Sylvia is an eye surgeon who cannot love her baby. Long,
carelessly, inattentively in love with an old friend, Sylvia has had a destructive
affair with Iris’s lover Rob, who has also become an eye surgeon. She
has done a corrective operation on Ruby’s son George in his adulthood.
A handful of other connections help to loosely bind the three threads, but
the intertwining is gently looped and unstrained, their weave more like macramé than
crochet.
Ferguson’s storytelling is authoritative. One never doubts that these
three women and their heartaches all belong in the same novel. Firm, sure,
intelligent and purposeful, her prose induces the same sense of trust of a
good surgeon, whose patients drift calmly under, in the faith that they will
wake much improved.
Eye surgery constitutes one of the novel’s unifying themes, and occasions
some of its more compelling passages. During George’s first childhood
operation by a Mr Barr, the boy considers his eye, “which not only saw,
which not only gazed, or glanced, or missed things that were important or got
things wrong; it worked both ways, it expressed, it shiningly conveyed emotion,
understanding, humanity itself. How could this personal instrument of the spirit
have working parts, like a bicycle? Be mended like one? It was very disturbing,
this feeling that what Mr Barr was doing was inherently unlikely.”
In fact, what may bring all three tales together is the waste of misperception – the
emotional cataracts, squints and astigmatisms that prevent us from seeing one
another clearly, the psychological myopia and purblindness that create so much
more unhappiness than the natural world necessitates.
Yet even minor characters glimpse part of the truth. Rob’s father, Dr
Wilding, “can see that his son has grown into a nice-looking young man.
Charming, his wife says sometimes, breezily. Beautiful, says Dr Wilding, in
his most secret heart, which has taught long ago to distrust beauty in all
its forms, and fears it to this day. ‘I prefer the simple things,’ he
told his wife long ago… But he lied. I fear the beautiful things
would have been nearer the truth. Beauty attracts admiration, but also excites
evil: greed. Lust. Better for Rob, to be less good-looking. It is dangerous,
to be so beautiful.”
This is a strong, affecting novel whose characters, while they may not themselves
see clearly, are vividly depicted – each sad, sympathetic and interesting.
Unusually well paced, the book is structurally complex but never confusing.
It is a pure pleasure to read.
Most successful writers of English literary fiction share the same difficulty:
they lack experience of work as experienced by ordinary people. Pat Ferguson,
a former nurse, has a very different problem. Despite winning the David Higham
and the Somerset Maugham prizes for her early novels, and being long-listed
for the Orange Prize two years ago with It So Happens, she cannot, in common
with many other middle-aged writers, find a mainstream publisher. If you want
to read Peripheral Vision - and anyone looking for the new Muriel Spark should
do so, immediately - you will have to order it from the tiny independent Solidus.
Yet its subject is one that will be immediately recognised and enjoyed by fans
of Kate Atkinson. How are three women, separated by geography and 50 years
of history, related? Sylvia is an eye surgeon, in "the awkward position
of having everything she had ever wanted". Successful, clever, pretty,
she has been brought by childbirth into the mess that is most people's experience: "the
waiting possibilities of pain, and fear, and death". Although it will
do her no end of good in the end, she is furious. She can't love her husband
or her baby.
Back in 1953, another child is being nursed by Iris. The child, George, is
about to lose an eye due to an accident; the operation, described in tender
yet gruesome detail, will not save his sight, but the real damage goes far
deeper. George, too, is an unloved child, and Iris unwittingly does as much
to heal him as Rob, the posh young doctor who wants to marry her.
George's mother Ruby is the daughter of an immigrant who has risen thanks to
a good war. She wishes her son dead now his beauty has been ruined; harrowed
by guilt, her perfectionism drives her mad. Humiliatingly, she even fails at
suicide.
The third woman in the story is the most poisonous, and the most amusing. Rob's
mother May has an unerring eye for quality, and is appalled at her son's fiancée.
She knows that Iris comes from the kind of family that does not have a maid,
least of all one as devoted to her as the silent, sinister Meadows. How the
devoted Meadows deliberately destroys the couple's happiness and trust, and
how their tragedy echoes down the generations is a story that is woven into
a Modernist collage of past and present which, against many odds ends with
love and optimism.
Ferguson skewers snobbery, selfishness and malice with deft, almost aphoristic
phrases, and her intelligence needles her creations out of their individual
ruts; but it is her understanding of suffering which cuts deepest.
As in her collection of short stories, Indefinite Nights, she has special knowledge,
writing about things that can only have been seen by a doctor or nurse. "How
could this personal instrument of the spirit have working parts, like a bicycle?" a
surgeon wonders, mending an eye.An utterly absorbing and captivating novel, Peripheral Vision explores both sight
and insight, in which people miss noticing what is really important but, like
Ferguson herself, not obvious - except, of course, with hindsight.