Sipsworth
44 pages • 1-hour read
Simon Van BooySipsworth
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Themes
The Difficulty of Overcoming Grief
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness and death.
Sipsworth explores Helen’s struggle to overcome grief, portraying it as a pervasive, defining aspect of her character and the novel’s plot. Helen’s crippling grief distorts her sense of self and isolates her from the world. It not only makes her so inert that she can hardly do more than nap and watch television, but she also berates herself and feels guilty for surviving her loved ones.
Helen’s grief dominates her life to such an extent that she personifies it, describing it as having “long whiskers.” This imagery emphasizes how she experiences grief not as an abstract emotion but as a living entity. In the book’s early chapters, Helen practices self-deprivation: For instance, she denies herself a piece of fudge because “her desire felt foolish and vain” (41), and she also stands outside in the freezing cold before she can “reward” herself with a second bath. She believes she deserves punishment because she was once so happy; since she is convinced that her former happiness has turned against her, she inflicts emotional punishment on herself.
The novel uses Helen’s profession as a retired cardiologist to highlight how her emotional state has clouded her rationality. She is so miserable that she is prepared to die, wishing to be with her dead loved ones. As a result, she ignores the symptoms of her impending heart attack, such as her dizziness after walking uphill and the numbness in her arm, despite her medical expertise. Her unwillingness to seek help reflects her self-imposed isolation from the world.
Helen often thinks back on the well she fell into as a child, which is a metaphor for her grief: The well was deep, the earth smothered her, the darkness overpowered her, and it even swallowed up her voice. In the depths of her adult grief, Helen has made herself similarly invisible. She doesn’t know any of her neighbors; none could say they knew her. She refuses to take a bus because there will be people on it, and she won’t take a taxi because it would “mean talking.” She actively turns away from “any face” that appears on her street. In Helen’s mind, her isolation isn’t a choice but an enactment of her idea that she doesn’t deserve companionship or joy.
However, the novel shows that love and connection succeed in pulling her out of her despair. Helen was rescued from the well through love, in the form of her parents, and an animal, the dog who located her. Sipsworth similarly rescues her from the depths of her grief in the same way, which she acknowledges as she tells him about the accident and how “in the end an animal” saved her (99). Not only does she love him, but her love and concern for him bring her a new circle of friends, easing her loneliness.
Finding God Through Love
As Helen grows emotionally through her love and concern for Sipsworth, she also undergoes a spiritual transformation. The novel first mentions God after Helen finds the mouse on her patio—she notices that its hands are clasped as if in supplication. In that moment, Helen spontaneously remembers these lines from Wordsworth’s poem “The Old Cumberland Beggar:” “So low as to be scorned without a sin; / Without offence to God cast out of view.” These lines describe the beggar of the poem’s title, whose life has inherent meaning despite his poverty. This idea foreshadows Helen’s later belief that all life, even that of a small mouse, carries intrinsic value.
That same afternoon, as Helen watches a televised church service, she thinks that “God is everywhere” (53). However, at this point in the story, she thinks that any God that could have taken her husband and her son from her could only be “very small and […] powerless, rather like the mouse in her sink” (74). Ironically, it is Sipsworth—this seemingly powerless creature—that acts on Helen like God, rescuing her from her lack of faith just as she rescued him from certain death in the garbage. These parallels are like divine interventions, much like the rescues in Helen’s past: Spanish fishermen saved her father from the ocean, and her own rescue from an abandoned well as a child.
The novel emphasizes the spiritual nature of these through biblical allusions. Both Helen’s rescue of Sipsworth and her rescue from the well take place in the early hours of a Friday morning; this is a reference to Good Friday, which is the day on which Christians commemorate Jesus’s crucifixion. The novel also alludes to Matthew 4: 19, in which Jesus tells his disciples that he will make them “fishers of men.” In Helen’s memory of her rescue from the well, her parents cast her name into the darkness like a “small net.” Later, when she is listening to news of a shipwreck in Part 7, she tells Sipsworth about her father’s rescue and hopes that if Sipsworth is ever lost at sea, some “nice fisherman” will scoop him up. Though she still hesitates to believe in a divine purpose, she admits that “something is going on” (89), signaling her shift toward faith.
Helen’s spiritual awakening deepens through her ordeal with Sipsworth’s respiratory illness. Marveling at the mouse’s breathing apparatus, she tells Dr. Jamal that it keeps her “guessing about a higher power” (141). Her newfound faith is confirmed as she tells Sipsworth not to fear death, because her family will be waiting for him. She asks the mouse to let them know that she’s fine, saying, “I wasn’t for a long time, but I am now” (169). Her declaration confirms that she has not only found faith but also peace.
Living in the Present Moment
At the beginning of the novel, Helen is so determined not to be haunted by memories of her lost loved ones. In an effort to erase the past, she has burned “all the photos and scrapbooks and report cards and certificates” (52), yet she finds that the memories always return. They remain so vivid that they seem more real to her than the people around her. By the novel’s end, however, the transformative power of her love for Sipsworth as well as her new friendships allow her to fully embrace the past while beginning to live in the present.
Helen initially drifts in and out of reveries, reliving both joyful and painful moments from the past. She compulsively revisits painful memories, particularly her husband Len’s sudden death and the time she fell into a well as a child. At the same time, her belief that her life is over has caused her to suppress other parts of her past, including her career as a doctor. She hints at this, marveling at the “miraculous” things her hands could once do, yet it is only in Part 9 that she reveals that she was once a highly successful pediatric cardiologist.
Sipsworth’s entrance into her life jolts her out of her self-imposed isolation and into awareness of the present. For instance, while Helen shops for herself and the mouse, she reflects that while she often heard the voices of her lost loved ones in moments of indecision, she now she feels “quite alone as if anything new in life comes at the expense of something past” (66). This thought captures her lingering belief that embracing the present means betraying her memories. Yet the mouse also rekindles long-forgotten recollections, such as Helen’s memory of singing “Over the Rainbow” while in an air raid shelter during the war. Sipsworth’s illness also prompts Helen to reveal for the first time that she is a cardiologist.
Through her love and concern for the mouse, Helen also finds a new community of friends who become like family. As she falls asleep at night, she begins to think of the real people in her present-day life instead of her lost loved ones. Her new friends also help her to remember the past without grief: Cecil connects her to the memory of her beloved father, while Dr. Jamal restores her pride in her career. She even imagines the lives she has saved all over Australia, recognizing that so many people are alive because of “an old woman […] who has recently adopted a mouse” (160). Helen no longer sees her past as a weight that keeps her trapped in grief. Instead, she understands that remembering her loved ones and moving forward are not mutually exclusive, which allows her to finally live in the present.
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