Eyes

Angus Rugg is a successful eye specialist in a city in the South in the turbulent 1960s. His career has been stellar in its own way, having started way back during the war, when he assisted the legendary Guillaume de Sevres in his experiments, first on soldier cadavers and then on live subjects, prisoners of war. Now Angus is ageing fast, and his doctor tells him that his heart is compromised - he won’t live long.His wife Maeve and son Hilary are still in the dark about this latest development - the right time to tell them needs to be found. It is all the more critical as Maeve is pregnant with their second child, after an interval of over twenty years. Hilary struggles with his father’s success and the generational gap between them, but is slowly forging his independent way as a journalist at the city’s main paper.Hilary’s fiancée Jadeen substitute teaches at the local secondary school and is alive to the currents that are beginning to sweep through society in these stormy times. Asked to teach from a history textbook with a prejudiced discussion of race, she struggles between her personal convictions and her career aspirations.When Angus gives one of his entertaining talks on the history of the Sevres experiments for a local society, a rival paper to Hilary’s sends someone new, veteran staffer Andrew Dodds, who happens to be one of Angus’ current patients. Hilary has always covered these talks dutifully, without enthusiasm. When Dodds’ story appears the following day, it is clear that he has seen an angle which Hilary has missed in his father’s smooth patter. The story of experiments on prisoners quickly goes national, and then international. Angus, at this critical time of his life and that of his family, is immediately notorious. Before the day is out, the situation will have come to a head also in all of their private lives, the currents of ambivalence and dissatisfaction exposed, and the comfort in which they have lived for so long shattered.In her third novel, Janet Burroway navigates with panache the undertow of disturbance that the rapids of the 1960s produced, when old certainties began to crumble and a new awareness dawned. Her superbly modulated prose attains new heights, limning the lives and minds of four people with rich complexity and full-flavoured subtlety.The famed novelist and critic Rosellen Brown discusses this novel with the author in an interview specially undertaken for this publication, providing insights into the creative process not only of this piece, but the persistent preoccupations across Burroway’s oeuvre which make her one of the outstanding proponents of fiction of her times.