A time for reflection | 8 March 2018

The precarious stasis of late pregnancy offers the narrator of Jessie Greengrass’s exceptional first novel a space — albeit an uncomfortable one — for reflection. She sifts through her own immediate and past experience: caring for her dying mother in her early twenties; her relationship with her partner Johannes; her childhood; the birth of her first child.

This fragmented narrative is intercut with the stories of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, the inventor of the X-ray; Sigmund and Anna Freud; and the 18th-century anatomist, surgeon and empiricist John Hunter — along with other brief cameos from the history of science, from the Lumière brothers to the engraver Jan van Rymsdyk. These figures are not quite fictionalised; the narrator is always present, reminding us that this is partly guesswork, that there are experiences she ‘can’t imagine’. And yet, through a kind of sleight of hand, and with the aid of what is evidently meticulous research (as conducted by both narrator and author), these scenes from the past are vividly realised. Admirers of the titular short story of Greengrass’s collection An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It will find much to enjoy here.

Greengrass was a student of philosophy, and this is a profoundly and unashamedly philosophical book. What ties these disparate historical figures together, and to the narrator’s own project, is the endeavour to place faith in ‘the promise of the simplifying power of explanation, sight’; to find meaning, structure, permanence, by making ourselves ‘transparent’ or ‘explicit’ to ourselves, whether through the revelation, by X-ray, of ‘all that would not rot’, or through the scrupulous rigours of analysis. Doctor K, the narrator’s formidable psychoanalyst grandmother, believes in our ‘capacity to trace our lives backwards and pick the patterns out’.