Peripheral Vision
Patricia Ferguson
Other Press, 2008
U.S. hardcover, first U.S. edition
ISBN 978-1-59051-287-6
376 pages; $24.95

Sylvia is a medical specialist; in the nomenclature of the United Kingdom, she is a consultant. Her specialty is eye surgery, and her work with those who have impaired vision forms the continuing metaphor for all of the characters of this confused and confusing novel.

We meet Sylvia first in 1995, shortly after she has had her first baby. Immediately after we learn how tired this baby has made her, we flash back to the tale of how she and her partner came to be together. We learn of the troubled birth of her child, and her lack of love for the infant – and by the end of the chapter, we’re 20 years in the future, after Sylvia has spent all this time caring for a child she did not love.

Do we get the story of how this relationship works next? No; oddly enough, that story is never told in this book. Instead, after 23 pages we switch to Will and his mother, the latter dying, the former a “resting” actor who is taking care of her. After introducing the characters, Ferguson suddenly whisks us to 1953 and the story of an accident suffered by a young boy named George, which tells us about a number of individuals who will come to occupy different niches in this continuing story: George (who has managed to put his eye out), Ruby (his mother), Iris (one of George’s nurses), and Rob (one of the medical students who has observed the surgery).

Then it’s back to 1995 and more about Sylvia for three pages, then back to Will for six pages – and then we’re in 1954, and Rob and Iris are now a couple. The reader now feels dizzy and disoriented, especially because there is no connection at all between any of the characters in the 1950s and the characters in the 1990s; why are these stories all jumbled together?

The answers are very slow in coming, with one revelation uncovered only in the final two or three pages of the book, entirely unforeseen or unforeseeable, and encompassed in a single sentence. In an effort to produce a complicated plot, it seems that the author has started so many threads that she dropped a few stitches somewhere along the line, and has simply gathered them up into a big heaping mess and tied them in a bow at the end of the book.

It’s unfortunate, because there are so many threads that would have supported interesting stories all on their own. I’d like to know more about Sylvia’s relationship with her child, Clio, for instance. By the end of the first chapter I know that Sylvia “was to live for twenty years in the closest possible service of someone she did not love,” but I don’t know what this means, precisely. Is she a cold mother who leaves her child’s care to a nanny, faking enthusiasm on those occasions when she cannot avoid Clio’s company? Is her devotion explained solely by the generous financial support she is able to give the child based on her income as an eye surgeon? How does Clio react to her mother’s disinterested devotion – a contradiction in terms if there ever was one? This could be an entire book in itself, but in fact we learn almost nothing about Clio except that her mother doesn’t love her.

Nor do we learn enough about eye surgery to justify it as a continuing metaphor. There are a few tantalizing tidbits, but this isn’t a story of anyone’s career in the field. It is a merely a device, which diminishes both the force of the metaphor and the power of the book as a whole. I would have enjoyed reading more about eye surgery in the 1950s compared to the 1990s, and the miracles that can be wrought with these strange orbs we all carry in our heads, and use for the sublime pleasure of reading books. Instead, though, we learn tiny bits about England’s class system, lingerie in the immediate aftermath of World War II, French cheeses, British sitcoms and a dozen other things.

I was surprised to read on the cover of this book that it was long-listed for the Orange Prize when it was first published in Great Britain in 2007, and even more surprised to read that this is the author’s sixth novel. I would have guessed that this was a first novel by someone not yet in control of her evident gifts at characterization and historical accuracy. It is promising in some ways, but ultimately no more than an interesting failure.

Peripheral Vision is Patricia Ferguson’s first novel to cross the Atlantic and see publication in the United States. And perhaps that explains it: the book simply didn’t translate to this American reader.