Scar Tissue

Sarah Robertson is associate editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual.

“[T]he inheritance, the family silver” is the narrator’s metaphor
for “dark starbursts of scar tissue”—the microscopic signs of a
neurological illness (presumably Alzheimer’s disease) that lays waste
to his mother’s mind. This harrowing and unforgettable novel (which
was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize) charts the relentless march
of the disease and it devastating effects on two families.

The narrator, a philosophy professor, comes to regard his mother as a
“philosophical problem” to be solved, or more specifically, as a
human paradigm of the relation between memory and selfhood. This is in
part a defence mechanism, a means of turning “something ... fearful
into something interesting.” But the fearful persists in the
narrator’s recognition that his mother has insight into her appalling
deterioration: “The illness spares her nothing.”

The narrator’s intellectual curiosity evolves into “lunatic
devotion”; he neglects his wife and child to stay at his mother’s
side, first at the family home, then in a nursing home. His quest to
comprehend the incomprehensible does not end with her death (a scene of
“banal heartlessness”). Unlike his neuropathologist brother, who
regards life’s uncertainties with an atheist’s serenity, the
narrator is tormented by irreconcilable personal traits—a religious
temperament without religious belief. He uses his own clinical
depression to explore avenues to selflessness: that is, to casting off
the burden of awareness and achieving grace through
“self-forgetting.” He is, of course, preparing for his own
genetically fated inheritance of the “family silver.”

More than a profoundly moving tale about the loss of parents, Scar
Tissue is a fascinating meditation on death, illness and stoicism, and
the precariousness of human identity and consciousness. The author, who
lost his own mother to Alzheimer’s, is unflinching in his insights and
refusal to resort to bromides. His book is no small act of courage.