First read 01/2025

Shortly after I started, I jumped to the About the Author section at the back of the book, and was thoroughly unsurprised to see that Busch had been a magazine columnist for 20 years. This book has the feel of a newspaper opinion piece: drawing on whatever the writer's been reading this week, they prattle on for a little while without really having anything much to contribute. The chapters might be tolerable on their own, but together, it becomes a mind-numbing cycle of examples and adoration.

Busch doesn't really have a lot to say about invisibility, though she's clearly fascinated by it, so the fleeting accounts of work by philosophers and photographers, and stories of invisible ink or camouflaged fish, are invariably followed up by a few lines that can invariably be summarised as 'Pretty neat, huh?' When she really tries to get more out of the examples, she usually says something about "possibilities" and "modern living", but doesn't go into much depth on the implications of all this.

At no point does she consider that in order to talk about the invisible, it must be a visible invisible: we must see the camouflaged battleships in order to discuss their camouflage; we must know about the Icelandic Huldufólk in order to say that they are invisibly there. To be recognised as invisible is necessarily to be visible, and if there were such a thing as a true invisibility, we wouldn't be able to recognise it. For all the examples Busch brings in, it's a shame she hasn't included Freud and his work on the difficulty of consciously analysing something that we must be, by very definition, unconscious of.