The Blackwater Lightship - Reviews

Dark, bleak and expertly told - James Ley October 23 1999

THERE are some early hints that The Blackwater Lightship might have a political theme. It begins with Helen waking to the sound of her son's nightmare. She is married to Hugh, who has links to Fianna Fail, speaks Gaelic (though Helen does not) and has his friends around to drink and sing patriotic songs in their kitchen. But the political teasers turn out seemingly to be red herrings. Hugh and their two sons are banished from the action as it becomes clear the main concern of the novel will be personal, not political. Helen's brother Declan is dying of AIDS and this brings together Helen, her mother and grandmother, and two of Declan's friends. They retreat to a coastal farmhouse to nurse Declan through the final stages of the disease. Thus Declan's illness becomes a catalyst for a confrontation with their troubled past and from out of the closet come the psychological skeletons. At his best, Toibin writes carefully considered, no-nonsense prose. There is sometimes a fine line between writing that is deceptively simple and just plain simple, and the novel does have its weak points, but there is plenty of the kind of writing at which Toibin excels: suggestive, subtle, letting his characters' actions speak for them. Toibin's characters are, in fact, often more interesting when they do not attempt to analyse themselves, as they sometimes do, and we are allowed simply to observe them. Though this is a novel in which three of the main characters are gay and one of them is dying of AIDS, it is not particularly concerned with dissecting the social or cultural issues this might raise. The main focus is on the family split, particularly the rift between Helen and her mother, Lily, traced back 20 years to the premature death from cancer of Helen's father. Declan's homosexuality, which he has kept secret from his mother until the last possible moment, is not the explicit source of confrontation. Instead, it is peripheral to the action, an added complication. Any novel that includes a dying brother, long-standing estrangements between daughter and mother, mother and grandmother, and a swamp of unresolved emotional issues surrounding a long-dead father, is in danger of collapsing under the weight of its cumulative tragedies. It is a credit to Toibin's skill as a writer that The Blackwater Lightship manages to avoid becoming an exploitative weepie. A hint of irony and the whole exercise would be doomed, but Toibin is too disciplined a realist to let any of these tragedies become melodramatic, bombastic or sentimental. His unswerving realism and sense of restraint are, in fact, his greatest assets. They allow him to flirt with Freudianism and come away with his narrative relatively unscathed, and unflinchingly present a dying man bearing the ravages of a disease without becoming sentimental or ghoulish. There is no need to overstate the pathos; AIDS is horrifying enough. Toibin's realism does not, however, prevent him from indulging in a little suggestive imagery. As the title would suggest, there is plenty of meaningful use of light and dark. A flick of a light switch is a symbolic act. Like his earlier novel The Heather Blazing, The Blackwater Lightship is set on the cusp of Wexford's eroding coastline; a setting that begs to be read as a metaphor. Toibin obliges, having Helen imagine ``everything dissolving, slowly disappearing ... dragged out into the unruly ocean until there was nothing any more but this vast chaos''. Which brings us back to politics and history. Helen's longing for oblivion and her sporadic misanthropy are a reaction to intractable human problems born of deeply felt prejudices, fears and a sense of injustice. Is the slow, painstaking attempt to heal a family rift a political allegory? Maybe. Toibin layers his text with hints at a broader significance. There are plenty of references to sleeping, waking and nightmares, and Toibin is certainly familiar with Stephen Dedalus' description in Ulysses of history as ``a nightmare from which I am trying to awake''. And it is always worth paying attention when an Irish writer writes of an ``uneasy peace'' and ``conflicts ... too sharp and too deeply embedded ... to fathom'', even if he is only describing a family squabble. But Toibin is far too cunning and alert to the needs of his story to make this overt. A worthy inclusion to the short list for this year's Booker Prize, The Blackwater Lightship is, as its subject demands, a serious, understated novel with little use for levity. It is at times so grim it seems almost perverse to recommend it as entertainment, though it is certainly compelling; it is a dark, bleak story, expertly told.