The Blackwater Lightship - Reviews

An Irish Family Torn by Love and Resentment Novel brings together three generations of women and the tragedy that binds them - Floyd Skloot August 20 2000

At 45 Irish author Colm Toibin, along with his more flamboyant contemporaries Roddy Doyle and Patrick McCabe, has established himself as a novelist of international appeal. Toibin writes untraditional love stories in which his characters' repressed feelings finally find release, often with mixed consequences. Restraint and compression are the source of his power.

``The South,'' about an Irish woman's rebirth as a painter and lover in Barcelona, won the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Award in 1991. ``The Heather Blazing,'' which won the 1993 Encore Award, concerns an Irish judge's awakening to human sympathy, and ``The Story of the Night'' (1997) is on the Lambda list of the 100 best gay novels of all time.

Toibin's fourth novel, ``The Blackwater Lightship,'' is now appearing in America after making the shortlist last year for England's Booker Prize. Though it lost to J.M. Coetzee's ``Disgrace,'' it deservedly won the popular vote as ``The People's Booker.''

As the story begins, Declan Breen is dying from complications of AIDS in a Dublin hospital. He is attended by two friends: Larry the architect and Paul, who works for the European Commission. Wishing to leave the hospital, Declan sends word to his family.

It is a calculated move. The family is a shattered hulk, the three generations of its women seething with anger and resentment. Declan's sister Helen, married and the mother of two boys, has not spoken to her own mother, Lily, for a decade. Lily runs a successful computer business and is estranged from her mother, Dora.

To complicate matters further, no one knows that Declan is sick; in fact, they do not know that he is gay. He is about to come out and to inform them that he is dying all in one flash, bringing everyone together in Dora's house by the sea.

Will love triumph, healing the familial wounds? Will the women learn at last to talk to each other? Toibin is too sophisticated to answer these questions in a predictable way, and he knows how people really behave in crisis. For example, when Helen drives from Dublin to Wexford in order to break Declan's news to their mother, she suddenly decides to head for the coast instead and tell their grandmother first. ``She would stay the night there; her grandmother would know how her mother should be handled.''

Toibin refuses to soften anyone's dilemma. While his chief concern lies with the emotional battles of Declan's family, he never ignores the young man's physical battle, adding urgency and perspective to both.

Imminent death, Toibin knows, cuts through nonsense. Helen's problems with her mother date to the period when Helen's father was dying. Helen's stubborn, judgmental nature resembles Lily's, as Lily's eccentricities resemble Dora's; the women seem genetically programmed to clash in the face of loss. ``I'm caught between wanting to make up with them and wanting to get away from them,'' Helen says.

Toibin allows us to penetrate the family's painful history and understand its three generations of prickly women. He is a relentless diagnostician of diseased personal dynamics.

Several powerful influences are placed in structural opposition, until the tangled relationships among them seem as twined as DNA; Declan's fractious family is not only contrasted but also placed in conflict with his caring friends. Helen realizes from the way Paul initially speaks ``that he considered her an outsider, a remote figure who had to be brought into the picture.''

In addition, Toibin pits Dublin's dense but impersonal city life against Wexford's sparse but meddlesome small-town ways. He portrays his Irish characters as closed- minded about matters of sexuality. Their ``sniping and sneering and cheap stupidity,'' are all compared to the more accepting attitudes found elsewhere in Europe.

The novel's central symbol is the lighthouse, Tuskar, whose rotating beam occasionally illuminates the rooms in Dora's house where the dark suffering happens. There was, at one time, a second lighthouse on the coast. ``It was called the Blackwater Lightship,'' Lily explains. ``It was weaker than Tuskar. Tuskar was built on a rock to last.'' Wistfully, she adds: ``I thought it would always be there.''

Everyone also thought the young and frisky Declan would always be there, but he was not built to last either. No one is, finally. When the Blackwater Lightship went dark, it marked a loss of light, of safety and certainty.

Toibin is concerned with what can be done to shore up the erosion of family life, and to protect ourselves from the forces arrayed against us. As in ``The Heather Blazing,'' the power of these forces is suggested by the crumbling cliffs of Wexford's shoreline, with its houses half-collapsed onto the strand, their interiors exposed to the weather once the walls have vanished.

Helen, walking there after a grim night full of Declan's anguish, grasps how relentless these forces are: ``The virus that was destroying Declan, that had him calling out helplessly now in the dawn, or the memories and echoes that came to her in her grandmother's house, or the love for her family she could not summon up, these were nothing, and now, as she stood at the edge of the cliff, they seemed like nothing.''

When it all seems overwhelming, Helen sees her mother rally beside Declan, offering him just the comfort he needs, and finds herself able to open up at last. Acknowledging her own and her family's needs, Helen moves toward a tentative acceptance of their failings and an appreciation of their strengths. Though it ends with the certainty of Declan's death, ``The Blackwater Lightship'' flashes a beacon of genuine hope. ``I think we all did our best,'' Helen says, and her voice resonates down three generations of the family's efforts to love.