The Blackwater Lightship - Reviews
Anticipation provides enormous momentum in life and fiction; it is so strong, so very like riding a wild horse. It changes, somewhere in childhood, from innocent excitement to dread, and then it must be controlled and manipulated. Forcing breaches with family members and friends hastens the future, makes it knowable, and this is what Toibin's characters almost always do. There is little reconciliation in Colm Toibin's novels; moments in which the stage is set for it usually pass. His novels build to these moments, fraught with potential, from which the air goes out with a nasty little hiss, and a new chapter, full of reasons not to live, begins. Here, an estranged family is brought together at Granny's rambling house on the coast of Ireland when the younger brother reveals that he is dying of AIDS. This child served many years as the family's lightning rod, and he continues to do so up to his death. It's good to read Toibin's honest novels, in which human beings fail to forgive, fail to understand. We spend so much of our lives in the dark, shouldn't literature face this as squarely as we must?
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