The Blackwater Lightship - Reviews

Book of the week - Patrick Brennan October 23 1999

The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin Picador, Stg£15 ONE scene relatively early on in Colm Toibin’s The Blackwater Lightship captures the essence of this hauntingly quiet and concentrated meditation on death and how it affects those around a loved one whose light is going out. Eleven year old Helen has just been told that her father has died of cancer. When she finds herself alone in the house she begins to reconstruct him by placing items of his clothing on the bed in her parents’ room. She takes his shirt and tie, his suit, his underwear and his slightly scuffed shoes and places them carefully on the bed. She then snuggles up beside ‘him.’

Tóibín describes the scene with the utmost economy of words. There’s virtually no emotional embellishment beyond what he uses to detail the young girl’s actions. All the pain and longing to have a loved one back when he or she dies, the need to fill up the space they once occupied, and the sense of overwhelming loneliness, are all here. The image of the young girl coping with loss is also utterly heartbreaking.

The Blackwater Lightship revolves around the imminent death from AIDS of 30 year old homosexual Declan, but the central character is really his elder sister, Helen.

Not quite in her mid 30s, and married with two boys, it’s Helen more than anyone else who has to decide whether or not she’s able to make a journey of reconciliation with life, in general, and her mother, in particular, in the face of her brother’s suffering.

As happens when we are confronted by the death of someone close to us, we are assailed by memories. Hence Helen’s recollection of her father’s death. Having herself been surprised by the news that her brother has AIDS and is very ill, Helen has to journey to inform their mother in Wexford Town. She loathes her mother and hasn’t spoken to her in ten years. Furthermore, Declan’s mother doesn’t know he’s gay.

Apart from the opening sections that describe Helen’s life in Dublin with husband Hugh, and in her job as a school principal, most of the novel is set in Helen’s maternal grandmother’s house by the sea at Cush. The lighthouse at Tuskar Rock is visible in the distance.

Thankfully, though, Tóibín doesn’t make a running metaphorical ‘wink and nod’ of the nearby lighthouse. (After Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse such a move might have appeared hackneyed). Helen and her mother, Lily, bring Declan to his grandmother’s. At his request he is followed down by two gay friends, Paul and Larry.

With the homosexuals as intermediaries and dying Declan their common cause, daughter, mother and grandmother rediscover their long severed bonds and attempt to come to terms with the pain and hurt they’ve inflicted upon one another. All five quietly tell their story.

With Colm Toibin, description is never used merely for its own sake. Rather, it has the function of revealing character in deceptively simple, detailed and subtly ordinary ways. Timeand again, Tóibín’s understatement and low key descriptive powers haunt, enchant and draw you in. Hence, 11 year old Helen reconstructing an imagined, still-alive father.

When Helen and her grandmother talk about her father’s death, and her time spent in Cush while he was dying, the momentousness of the conversation is counterpointed by the seemingly mundane description of the grandmother pouring tea, taking a boiled egg from the Aga and putting it on the table. Equally, a description can surprise and evoke a world of thoughts. Like when Larry and Helen are sitting next to Declan in his bed in the early hours of the morning trying to comfort him in the dark. A moment of silence is created thus: ‘They listened to the distant roar of the sea and the moths’ brittle wings against the window pane, but they said nothing.’ Power and vulnerability, strength and weakness, the big and the small in one simple but precisely perfect contrast.

The significance of the title, The Blackwater Lightship, emerges in a moment of confessional recollection by Helen’s mother to her daughter and Declan’s gay friend, Paul. She points out that there used to be two lighthouses at Tuskar Rock. The weaker, more vulnerable one, which she called The Blackwater Lightship, no longer exists. She imagined it was the female partner to the male Tuskar. She thought it would be there forever, but she was wrong. The disappearance of the Blackwater Lightship stands for all the absences and losses the characters in the novel have to come to terms with. Its not being there any more is a poignant reminder of the passing time and our own mortality.

The hastening to premature death of Declan provokes in all the characters a need to tell their story. Colm Toibin is reminding us once again that it is the sense of our own death that impels us on to create and act. The Blackwater Lightship resonates everywhere with the deft touch of a master writer at the peak of his craft.