(Scribner: New York, 2004)
Trade Paperback, 273 Pages, Fiction
ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE
From the Cover: It is Ireland in the early 1990s. Helen, her mother, Lily, and her grandmother, Dora, have come together to tend to Helen’s brother, Declan, who is dying of AIDS. With Declan’s two friends, the six of them are forced to plumb the depths of their own histories and to come to terms with each other. The Blackwater Lightship, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is a deeply resonant story about three generations of an estranged family reuniting to mourn an untimely death. In spare, luminous prose, Colm Tóibín explores the nature of love and complex emotions inside a family at war with itself. Hailed as “a genuine work of art” (Chicago Tribune), this is a novel about the capacity of stories to heal the deepest wounds.
My Review: In his poem, “The Death of the Hired Man,” Robert Frost said “Home is where, when you go there, / They have to take you in” (122-123). But he also says, in the very next lines, that home is “Something you somehow haven’t to deserve” (125). Now, I have no idea if Tóibín ever read Frost’s poem (I would be surprised if he didn’t, but I can’t say for certain that he did) but the dueling sentiments that Frost expresses in his poetry are the same that Tóibín explores in The Blackwater Lightship.
Tóibín’s novel is one that hinges on the definitions of two words: FAMILY and HOME. What these words mean, in their many incarnations and interpretations changes how one perceives the novel, its characters, and—ultimately—what Tóibín wants to say. Is “family” confined to those to whom we are related to through birth and blood? or is there a potentially looser interpretation of the word that can be expanded to mean those to whom we are closest? Is family and all that that so very loaded word implies “unconditional,” or can we set the terms on which we interact with our loved ones? Is “home” simply the place where we live(d), where we grew up? Or is it something more? What does it mean to “come home” if one has no place one can call “home”?
Through the device of a son dying of AIDS, Tóibín paints a portrait of what it means to be a family and what it means to have a home, by denying the related main characters, Helen and Declan and their Mother and Grandmother, and existence that resembles familial bonds and a place that anyone of them can really call “home.” These are, “home” and “family,” two things that one should not have to work for as do Tóibín’s characters. Discovering that “family” and “home” are “something you somehow haven’t to deserve” is what these characters eventually learn, though it does come—for them—at a price, one that, all too often, family members are unwilling to pay, or pay reluctantly and resentfully.
Lightship is also a novel about enduring the unendurable. I have never had to go through the death of a child or my wife, so I cannot know what an empty gulf must exist in one’s life after such a devastating loss. I can imagine what I would go through (the words “complete ruin and desolation” come to mind) but until I actually am required to go through such an event, nothing I can imagine would be bad enough. It would be completely unendurable.
What Tóibín attempts to teach in this novel is that while one cannot completely isolate oneself from the soul-eroding forces in life, there are ways to inure oneself against these forces. Tóibín does this through the imagery of the eroding sea cliffs in Wexford, Ireland, and the houses that have been claimed by the forces of nature, and those—like that of Helen and Declan’s Grandmother—that have yet not. Through this imagery, one can take the lesson that if one does not prepare oneself, inure oneself, against the eroding forces of life, one will end up an empty shell, a wreck—recognizable as a human being, but soulless and empty on the inside. However, if one prepares oneself against this inevitability (and it is inevitable, the sea will never stop pounding the cliffs at Wexford, and life will never stop throwing the unendurable at us), as begins to happen to the Grandmother’s house, one can prepare for these pressures of life and endure, and come through still whole mentally, emotionally and spiritually.
It is a hard thing to do, endure the unendurable … often it seems that one is screaming into the night and into the dark in search of comforting arms, and none come, and we draw the conclusion that we are alone. Tóibín shows us—through Declan’s struggle—that we are never truly alone as long as we properly prepare ourselves. It is only when we give up that the erosive forces can gain a toe-hold.
I’ve probably waxed philosophical longer than is necessary here, but I loved this book and the many layers it had and the message of hope in the face of inevitability that Tóibín presents, and there is so much moiré to this novel. Just as I cannot be completely sure of Tóibín’s exposure to Frost, I cannot state with certainty that he was also aware of (or, at least, actively channeling) William Shakespeare and Mikhail Bakhtin but Tóibín so perfectly molds the Fool from King Lear and Bakhtin’s theories of Rabelais and the Carnival and the role of the Fool to the demands of his narrative (in the role of Declan’s friend Paul) that I am amazed and awed at Tóibín’s grasp of his craft.
He also uses Irish tradition and culture to such great effect in The Blackwater Lightship, especially the ritual of waking (see also HERE) that one could easily re-title the novel Declan’s Wake, and see the entirety of the narrative as a “grand wake” in the tradition of Joyce and Finnegan’s Wake. The value of storytelling and communication and their roles in the waking ritual loop us back to what it means to be “A Family” and how to communicate with those whom you love and with whom you interact, showing quite effectively, I might add, that the use of language and story is of the utmost importance.
This is a beautiful, powerful and moving novel, and has me looking forward to discovering more of what Tóibín has to offer the Reader. In the meantime, if you haven’t already discovered The Blackwater Lightship for yourself, I cannot recommend strongly enough that deserves to be a priority on your “To Be Read” list.
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