Women’s Prize 2018: Sight

I chose Sight as my first read from the shortlist because I wasn’t expecting to enjoy it. And I was half right: I didn’t not enjoy it, I just didn’t enjoy it either. It wasn’t quite what I expected, and as such kept me interested throughout if only out of curiosity as to what it was trying to do .

I was anticipating one fluid narrative, tracking the unnamed narrator from her decision to become a mother through to her giving birth. Instead, we meet our narrator as she is pregnant with her second child. From this present she reflects on the dynamics of motherhood, rolling very quickly through memories of bereavement, relationships, pregnancy and depression. This collection of personal anecdotes is then interspersed with snippets of scientific history, including the first Caesarean section and the advent of the smallpox vaccine.

I am usually a sucker for an intertextual, memoir-style read, but in this case I found the historical passages simply boring. They added nothing to my understanding of the story at all and, despite some parallels with the narrator, felt totally unnecessary. Even in such a short book (just under 200 pages) these parts dragged. If they had been omitted I think the story could’ve had some impact, but as it was, it felt stilted, lacking any kind of forward momentum. For me, this was also due to Greengrass’ style — long, complicated, metaphor-heavy sentences which left me rereading, wondering if I’ve missed the point, or whether there even was one.

Honestly, the theme of motherhood doesn’t really entice me to read a book — and maybe that’s because I’m not the audience that the book was written for. But despite my initial misgivings, I found myself enjoying the thematic focus of Sight more than anything else. The beginning of the book focuses on the death of the narrator’s mother, almost uncomfortably honest in its portrayal of the self-absorbed not-quite-adult.

“For months my purpose had been imposed by circumstance, the structures of my life externally define so that I had been like a creature inside an exoskeleton, soft and pulpy, held to shape by a rigidity that was not my own, and I had resented it.”

The passages detailing grief were the most powerful in the book. With her mother’s drawn out illness and eventual death, the disintegration of the familiar parent-child roles lay the groundwork for the rest of the book. The narrator begins to realise that parenthood is a role that people fill, and that there was more to both her mother and her grandmother than her own perception of them. Greengrass managed to detail the nuances of wanting to retain an untainted image of your parents, resenting their dependency, and the sometimes stifling inescapability of that relationship, without disregarding the narrator’s love for her mother.

I finished this book feeling as though there was more ground to cover on the complexities of parental roles, but not really caring at all about the narrator, her partner, their daughter or their new baby. I think it could’ve made quite a powerful short story about grief and motherhood, but ended up feeling overstretched and fell a bit flat for me.