[In the following excerpt, Sutherland offers a positive assessment of The Invisible Worm.]

Jennifer Johnston is a full-time professional who has won, or come close to winning, her profession's highest prizes (though not the mass readership that sometimes goes with them). The Invisible Worm is a skilled exercise in narrative economy. It must be the kind of novel you can write only if you've spent years writing novels. Johnston uses words as if she were buying them with her life's savings from a jeweller's. A woman looks out into her garden on the coast of Ireland. She sees another woman running away. It is herself. She is schizophrenic (‘mad’ as her unkind, ‘peculiar’ as her kind neighbours say). The daughter of a senior politician who has just died, Laura is the wife of an EEC official who ‘took’ her for the dowry of her father's patronage. He is Catholic, she is Protestant. Her husband's attentions smother and reduce her, as did her father's, to doll-like impotence. She hates the closeness of men—aftershave, tobacco and hot licking tongues on her cheek. Laura lives ‘in two tenses.’ Her mind flits uncontrollably between the present and twenty years ago when something awful happened to her in the summerhouse (it's not giving away more than the title does to reveal that the something was grossly sexual). With the help of a ‘spoiled priest'—another of life's casualties—Laura frees herself from the past and achieves a kind of cure. She and the running woman are one. The novel ends with her looking out of the same window, seeing not the past but ‘my future—an empty page on which I will begin to write my life.’ She has discovered a third tense. Whether she will leave the ‘mad museum’ of her marital home is left open.

The Invisible Worm offers a description of child abuse so affecting and at the same time so tactful that one is tempted to claim that the novel as a genre must be peculiarly privileged in exploring the full awfulness of the crime. But what impresses one most is how effectively—how professionally—Johnston makes words work for her. The narrative is composed of broken sentences, half-repressed memories, tight-lipped dialogue, thought which scarcely dares form itself into language. On the page, with its profusion of white space and ellipsis, The Invisible Worm looks like shorthand notes for a novel. And there are not many pages. These dabs and scraps create a resonantly complete design in the reader's mind. The narrative pivots on such fine points that by changing about five hundred words (incidental references to the European Community, cars, the radio, and so on), you could convert The Invisible Worm into a New Woman novel of the 1890s. It was not until page 30 that I picked up an unequivocal historical marker—plastic detritus on the beach. The book has a handsomely understated jacket by Craig Dodd whose Edwardian design enhances the historical ambiguity, as does the Blakean title. …