The Blind Eye

by Georgia Blain

Silas is haunted by the vision of a luminous, surreal garden on the outskirts of Port Tremaine, a desolate country town. In this garden lives Constance, as beautiful as the morning and as blind as the night. They say Constance can see the truth at the heart of things to which others are blind - but where does truth begin and blindness end?

When Silas leaves Port Tremaine, he is unable to live with his memories of the garden and unable to make sense of his fractured life. He goes to Daniel for healing, but he is not the only one who needs to be healed. As Silas learns to come to terms with what he saw and what he refuses to see, Daniel, too, begins to recognise his own habitual blindness and learns to open his eyes to the truths about his own past.

The Blind Eye is a shimmering tale of nature and artifice, love and obsession, vision and sight, and memory and forgetting.

384 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 2003

About the author

Georgia Blain has published novels for adults and young adults, essays, short stories, and a memoir. Her first novel was the bestselling Closed for Winter, which was made into a feature film. She was shortlisted for numerous awards including the NSW and SA Premiers' Literary Awards, and the Nita B. Kibble Award for her memoir Births Deaths Marriages. Georgia's works include The Secret Lives of Men, Too Close to Home, and the YA novel Darkwater. In 2016, in addition to Between a Wolf and a Dog, Georgia also published the YA novel Special. She lived in Sydney, where she worked full-time as a writer.

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Once again there is an enigmatic guru, this time a so-called healer, fiddling about with some strange so-called therapy involving homeopathy and long, presumably expensive interviews to seek out the cause of Silas’s angst. Pseudo-science is always expensive., but Simon is unbelievably rich since his parents died and left him their ill-gotten gains. He has plenty of money to shout his friends any amount of drugs and booze but he’s not happy. (Well, none of Blain’s characters ever are.)

To see the rest of my review (and how this book fits into a pattern of moody introspection in Blain's books) see http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/200...

[Chris Waterford · Rating 1 out of 5]

The quality of the writing kept me reading this as I kept on waiting for the various strands of the story to fall into place. I liked that the story was about alternative healing remedies ---but found the narrative very disjointed. Not her best work. Her later work was 5 star quality.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weirdly unputdownable, a strange story on the surface of unlikeable and quite dull characters doing nothing much at all. Scratch the surface and you have a story that digs deep into what motivates people to behave in certain ways, the truths we tell and the lies we try to forget. Odd, unsettling and beautifully written.

[John Gilbert · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a disappointment. I've loved everything Ms Blain has written until this incomprehensible book about uninteresting people with no seeming redeeming value. Hopefully this has been a one off as I will continue to read everything published by her.

[Nathalie Bilinsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am working my way through Georgia Blain's books after the delightful discovery of We All Lived in Bondi Then last year and true to her exquisite form, I found this book unputdownable. I loved the way she dealt with the characters' inner lives and motivations and the descriptions of the Australian outback was very evocative.

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

I struggled with this. So many people making such hard work of life..