The Blackwater Lightship - Reviews

Of hurt and healing in the heart of a family - Tim Trengove Jones November 14 1999

SINCE its salad days in the Victorian period, the English novel has been fixated on family romance. It has diagnosed the damage done by parents to children and shown that paradoxical reflex of hope in which, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the family might still emerge as a haven rather than an agent of neurosis.

In his latest novel, The Blackwater Lightship, Colm Toibin revisits this familiar terrain. The book is full of deft nuances, fine insights and well-nigh unbearable sadness. It is no surprise that it made it onto the short shortlist for the Booker Prize this year, before being beaten by J M Coetzee's Disgrace .

The emotional fragility and familial tension that are Toibin's subjects here find a stark symbol in the novel's setting. Toibin has his characters gather in the grandmother's house near Cush on the Irish coast. Nearby houses have already slid into the sea, while others stand deserted and vulnerable in the face of the relentlessly corrosive wash of the tide.

Perched on the edge of the cliff, never secure, the setting is the perfectly imagined site for the edginess of the characters who move across it.

Into this habitat Toibin introduces six characters, brought into contact, rather than together, on an occasion ordinary, frightening and unstoppable: terminal illness.

Declan is in the terminal stages of AIDS, and asks to spend a brief period at his grandmother's house, a place where he and his sister, Helen, the novel's protagonist, stayed years earlier while their father was in hospital dying of cancer. Two of Declan's friends and his mother complete the cast.

The house, dank and dingy, crackles into new life as it becomes the scene for the playing out of an intense blend of animosity, hurt, pride, need, prejudice and misunderstanding. Keeping watch over one man's mortality, the characters measure the value and quality of their own lives.

At first, physical proximity merely heightens the emotional distance between mother and daughter. Helen did not tell her mother she was marrying, nor did she announce the birth of her two sons. For seven years they have been strangers. Helen tells her mother, with cruel honesty, that she was delighted to have "got away" from her.

Like Dickens, Toibin is intent on pointing out how, despite the illusion of closeness fostered by the institution of family, families are, par excellence , the locale of secrets: "I never told you anything," Helen tells her mother.

Seeming to believe in the triumph of reason over curdled emotion, and the power of honest explanation as a catalyst for healing, Toibin has his characters begin to speak to, rather than round or at, each other.

Granny's kitchen becomes the site for an array of revelations. Watched over by two cats, tea is liberally dispensed and, eventually, sympathy is as well. The rawness of such intimacies, the shocking power of such communication, is suggested by the ringing of granny's cellphone, the cats' leaping in fright and crockery crashing to the floor.

Toibin is even-handedly attuned to human frailties. Alive to the divisions between generations, aware of the rifts caused by religion and history - he is Irish, after all - alert to the erosions of time and family politics, his master images here are of rupture and loss. He is realistically aware of the deformations such things cause. Standing on the shore near the end of the book, Helen feels "nothing except a hardness in her heart against the world".

Such emotional realism ramifies. Faced with Declan's suffering, family and friends are "rendered useless". Such pathos is reinforced as he "cries to himself, beyond their comforting".

Here Toibin offers his own permutation on impotence in the face of what J M Coetzee's novel calls "the disgrace of dying".

Both Coetzee and Toibin offer a bleak world in which compassion might be triggered by our awareness of mutual vulnerability. Both see our endurance as complicated by the denial of family affiliation. However, Toibin suggests that deep wounds can be healed. Of granny's kitchen he writes: "It's like going to confession, except there's no lighthouse in a confession box."

With such sweet and sour humour, he enchants with a dream of restitution.