NEWS & EVENTS

Some books take a very long time to come about – not necessarily the writing itself, but the idea of what you want to write about, and how you might combine several different ingredients to form a plot.

The process that led to my writing Monochrome began back in 2004, when I started to go blind in my left eye. One of the first symptoms was a lack of colour vision: when I closed my right eye, I saw the world through a grey veil.

Being able to make the world go from colour to black-and-white and back again just by winking was weird – and it really made me appreciate colour, something I’d always taken for granted before. Colour not only makes the world beautiful, but it also makes a huge difference to how we feel, think, and communicate.

The problem took several months to diagnose – eye doctors said vague things about ‘toxins’ and that this was ‘something that occasionally happens to very short-sighted people’ (I’m certainly one of them – negotiating the world without some form of eye-correction is basically impossible). I had an operation, but it didn’t work.

I was scared. What if the same thing happened to my right eye? Poor eyesight runs in my family – my dad went blind, and so did the great aunt who brought him up… But so far – touch wood – I’m OK. I won’t ever regain the sight in my left eye, but my right one (with the benefit of glasses or a contact lense) still works fine, for which I am very, very grateful.

I thought a lot about the effect of toxins (no-one ever said what these were, exactly, but they could have been quite a number of things) on eyesight. It  made me wonder about what invisible damage humans might be doing to themselves and to other species, that we might not find out about until it was too late. In 2018, I began to notice more and more articles about the dangers caused by microplastics: they aren’t just in the ocean – they’re in what we eat and drink and the air that we breathe, and they carry harmful micropollutants…

Sometimes – as with cooking – two ingredients, or ideas, combine because they are just meant to, and together they are greater than the sum of their parts. I finished writing Monochrome in 2019, just before the impact of Covid. I was first intrigued and then alarmed by the parallels between the world I’d imagined and the world as it actually existed – and research carried out last year has discovered that microplastics can, as I’d written, cross the blood-brain barrier, and that they have ‘significant negative impact’ on certain types of brain cells…

Let’s hope that the Monochrome Effect isn’t one of them.

© Jamie Costello 2022