Stephanie Jones: Book Review - Blind

Twyla and Dylan Ridley are the happiest of couples at the outset of Cath Weeks’s debut novel, Blind. Their much-wanted first child enters the world with a minimum of fuss, after a 20-minute labour. As Twyla takes him into her arms, she is ecstatic – until she looks into his eyes, “cloudy blue, and utterly blank”, and feels afraid. Her instinct is corroborated 19 days later when Charlie Ross, dual-named like the boys Twyla knew in her Louisiana girlhood, is diagnosed with a rare, incurable disorder. He is blind.

So far, so standard, and Weeks, whose own son Wilfred had special needs, ably conveys the frustration, confusion and agony of a parent who knows her child will experience the world very differently to his peers. The first hint that there’s a sting in this tale comes with the arrival of Paul, a photographer who captures the happy new family for the Bath local newspaper.

The reason for his attendance is pure ritual – Charlie Ross was the hospital’s first birth that Christmas Day – but no reader familiar with the vulnerable-woman archetype will fail to register how Paul clocks Twyla’s “luminous, magnetic” physicality and the good-looking husband attending her.

Zoom out on the family and the ecstasy disperses. Twyla’s relationship with her psychologist father, Stephen, is hostile, teetering on the edge of estrangement. She has never met her stepmother, Juliet. The grooves of such distance are well worn; Stephen is so distant from his own elderly parents that his mother informs him of his father's death in a letter, which he doesn't open until after the funeral.

Twyla lost her mother in tragic circumstances as a schoolgirl, whereupon she and Stephen moved to London. Stephen worked hard to establish a career and slough off the signifiers of the American South in his speech and mannerisms, and he unwittingly shook off his only child with it. As an adult, Twyla feels she lost the wrong parent and kept "the bare one", like putting the contents of a pantry out for recycling and carefully stocking the shelves with empty cans and jars.

Dylan too is acquainted with brokenness. His disabled sister Felicity died young, and his father left the family soon afterwards, never to be seen again. Dylan’s surviving sister, Bindi, privately believes that the risky but potentially sight-giving surgery planned for Charlie Ross is a mistake, because nature cannot be defied. Their mother Eileen is less circumspect in her judgement, and takes visible pleasure in withholding affection and support.

Stephen, having made a fatal oversight in the case of his first wife, is alert to depression and immediately pins an unvoiced diagnosis on Eileen, one of those "who wore it deeper, as though they had swallowed the misery to hide it."

Indeed, the loss and grief pervade the novel, somewhat overshadowing what is nonetheless an effective mystery centred on the baby's health and treatment. Anonymous letters to the Ridley home carry insinuations that Twyla should leave well alone and not pursue the surgery. The parents' indecision is founded on trauma, and their fear of a greater disaster than blindness is justified. Yet Blind is more thought-provoking than saddening, as Weeks magnifies her characters’ fearful and self-conscious reactions to their unconsoled pasts and the unknown future.

Blind is an unusual melange of psychological missing-person thriller, morality play, and drama of marriage and family. The absorbing blend means Charlie's story, while ostensibly at the forefront of his family's concerns, triggers grief that spreads like a contagion, with a sightless little boy representing fathomless loss.