This is a book full of big skies and troubled horizons. There is trauma and drama in the pulsing light. There’s a car spinning sideways and a small wooden railing, orphaned children, loss of purpose, loss of hope, a dinghy rowed out to sea. The light is both a beacon and a searcher, highlighting trouble at sea, trouble at home.
It’s the story of a lighthouse keeper’s family. Bill has been a keeper for longer than most, his wife Annie with him. When the grandchildren join them they are grieving their son, while helping the youngsters find a way to adjust to a new life. Of course, in any situation this would not be easy, but here they’re living on a cliff below a lighthouse. Lighthouse keeping is an acquired taste; the isolation and the wildness take a certain cast of character. There is a routine to the days that is constant, but Annie and Bill’s well-ordered lives have been disrupted, the beam of the light now also focusses in, and they are on constant watch for pending upset with their new family situation. The pulse of the light provides a stabilising heartbeat through the book.
Annie says being busy is the best way to get through hard times. Jess doesn’t mind helping, but Robert does. He’s always in his bedroom with the door firmly shut. She bangs on his door and says, ‘Come and help with the wood’ but he doesn’t answer.
On good days Jess and Robert scramble down the path to the beach and Bill takes them out in the dinghy, teaches them how to row, to fish. Other days, an invasion of growling and caterwauling penguins under the bedroom floor at night is terrifying. Robert particularly, needs all the love his grandparents can give him as he struggles through his grief. He walks rigidly, as though he’s holding himself together, as though if he lets go for even a moment his arms will fall off. Bill and Annie don’t know how to reach him. He finds himself in his own way: in a dramatic rescue of a fishing boat on the shore below the cliff; and when he takes up model making, a skill he learned from his father and through which he finds a kind of peace.
As well as being a family story, this is an account of the de-manning of the lighthouses in the era of automation. Bill is initially calm about this progress. ‘You’re not getting rid of me for a while! This lighthouse will be one of the last. They’ve said that. They say they’ve got a long-term plan. Ha! A government department that’s got a long-term plan. Anyone believe that?’ The stress builds. If you know anything about the history of lighthouses in this country, you’ll know where this is heading. It’s not something, like Bill’s storm forecast, that will quickly blow over.
The story does reach forward many years, to Jess’s studies on the history of lighthouses and to Robert’s lost years. We glimpse where their disrupted childhood has left them but can also recognise the powerful impact of Bill and Annie and the lighthouse on their lives. It draws them back.
This is a wonderfully atmospheric book with a complicated family dynamic and believable characters. Well windswept.
Cristina Sanders' blog 