{"id":7791,"date":"2012-09-26T17:24:09","date_gmt":"2012-09-26T21:24:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=7791"},"modified":"2016-07-28T22:47:54","modified_gmt":"2016-07-29T02:47:54","slug":"alison-moore-the-lighthouse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2012\/09\/26\/alison-moore-the-lighthouse\/","title":{"rendered":"Alison Moore: The Lighthouse<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Lighthouse<\/strong><\/em><\/span>\r\nby Alison Moore (2012)<\/span>\r\nSalt Publishing (2012)<\/span>\r\n184 pp<\/span><\/pre>\n
If you like “walking” novels and heard there was a good one on the Booker longlist, you were probably hearing about\u00a0The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold<\/em> Fry<\/em> (my review here<\/a>).\u00a0Despite the qualities that book had, I didn’t like it and didn’t consider it a suitable representative of the “walking” novel genre, whatever that is. I wasn’t sad when\u00a0Harold Fry<\/em> didn’t make the Booker shortlist.\u00a0Fortunately, the “walking”\u00a0genre didn’t lose out and is in fact represented on the shortlist by a superb debut novel, The Lighthouse<\/em>.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Futh, our protagonist, is\u00a0crossing the North Sea on a ferry, on his way to go for a days’-long\u00a0walk\u00a0in Germany. Much is introduced in this opening. Standing on the ferry deck,\u00a0Futh\u00a0thinks back to years earlier when he sat with his father in a movie theater. In this memory, his father proceeds to tell\u00a0Futh\u00a0a story of when he met Futh’s\u00a0mother in a movie theater (she was handing out the popcorn, and Futh’s\u00a0father had gone to the movies with someone else), and we get\u00a0a sense that Moore is going to be nesting story within story, and that she’s going to pull it off. Also, while Futh thinks back to sitting in that theater with his father, we\u00a0get an uncomfortable sense of how repulsive and sudden human contact can, at times, be:<\/p>\n
Futh\u00a0felt the warm pressure of his father’s thigh against his own, felt the tickle of his father’s arm hairs on his own bare forearm, the heat of his father’s beery breath in his ear hole, his father’s hand reaching into his lap, taking popcorn.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I admit I jumped a bit when Futh’s father reached into his lap, before I realized he was just reaching for some popcorn, and I’m sure Moore wanted us to be wary going forward. Not only has the past been tragic, but this is an ominous trip.<\/p>\n
We also learn in this opening\u00a0that long ago Futh’s mother abandoned him and his father (something else that relates to Harold Fry<\/em>). “‘Do you know,’ Futher\u00a0heard his mother say, ‘how much you bore me?'”, and Futh\u00a0knows that she’d rather have some excitement in her life than spend even a day longer with his father, and losing Futh\u00a0is not that big a deal.\u00a0We also learn that Futh himself has just lost his wife, possibly because she also thinks he’s incredibly boring.<\/p>\n
So this trip to Germany is an attempt to grapple with his past and present demons, to hopefully restore some balance in his life. Futh’s\u00a0first stop along the way is at Helhaus\u00a0(German for “lighthouse”), a nice bed-and-breakfast, where the hostess Ester is dealing with her own\u00a0marital problems. In fact, from here on out, the book will alternate chapters — one for Futh, one for Ester —\u00a0until Futh’s\u00a0journey comes full circle and he plans to stop at Helhaus once more before hopping on the ferry for home.<\/p>\n
As Futh’s\u00a0journey progresses, the story’s complexity reveals itself both in narrative ties and symbolic ties.\u00a0We’ve already seen that both Futh\u00a0and his\u00a0father were abandoned by unhappy spouses, and, in fact,\u00a0both spouses were named Angela (though Futh’s\u00a0wife repeatedly told him “I am not your mother”).\u00a0Maternal abandonment leaves\u00a0Futh sexually confused at a young age:<\/p>\n
‘We can do without her,’ his father said as they walked on. But Futh\u00a0knew that every woman his father brought into the hotel room was a substitute for her. Some of them even looked like her. And Futh, seeing the women going into the bathroom, watching them in the mirror in the middle of the night, desired them himself.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This confusion is brought out again when Futh’s\u00a0father remarries\u00a0to their neighbor, Gloria. For some time, Futh\u00a0had been friends with Gloria’s son, Kenny, but that’s not to last, particularly when one evening Futh\u00a0falls asleep watching a movie with Gloria,\u00a0Gloria puts him in bed with Kenny. Kenny is livid the next morning, and their shaky\u00a0friendship doesn’t survive. Sexual confusion continues when one day Futh walks in to find Gloria bathing. She asks him to scrub her back, saying that usually Kenny does this for her. Naturally, this brought Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence<\/em> to mind, and I now cannot think of any movie that better matches the tone\u00a0of these murky moments of heightened reality, again showing how something can\u00a0be an aphrodisiac at one moment and repulsive the next.<\/p>\n
Besides abandonment and sexual confusion, but related to them, infidelity is strung in with all of the narrative threads. While at Helhaus\u00a0Ester and her husband, Bernard, are still\u00a0together, she’s been unfaithful for years (“She remembers her first infidelity, but she does not remember them all”),\u00a0at times hoping that jealousy will make Bernard hold on to her harder.\u00a0Ester and Bernard themselves come from some infidelity; Ester was originally engaged to Bernard’s brother, Conrad. We wonder if Futh’s\u00a0father ever hit on Futh’s\u00a0wife, and we wonder if Futh’s wife ever had an affair with\u00a0Kenny. Actually, we never get much of this resolved, and that’s okay. The moments that suggest something may have happened come into the narrative in a single sentence and drift away as quickly (if we’re not paying attention, we’ll never see them), and the questions raised\u00a0linger and the potential answers disturb us all the more as the book proceeds to a conclusion we are dreading.<\/p>\n
Besides the narrative connections, there are any recurring symbols: venus fly traps, moths, lighthouses, etc. If anything, this is the spot where I can see some weakness in Moore’s works.\u00a0Sometimes she prods us with her clever symbols:\u00a0what a character says about a real venus fly trap, for example, will become relevant to how a character acts later in a chapter entitled Venus Fly Trap. It’s not\u00a0always nice to get the writer prodding us on in this way, but in\u00a0The Lighthouse<\/em> this\u00a0didn’t become a big issue for me. Rather than\u00a0detract from the story, these symbols, however overt, kept me right on track and served to emphasize just how many narrative connections the story has.<\/p>\n
So, back to the walking aspect. As Futh\u00a0walks, his memories return, sometimes in fragments, sometimes clearly, and often are repeated. We hear Futh’s\u00a0mother ask his father “Do you know how much you bore me?” several times, and we see how this unwanted memory insists on being present everyday that Futh\u00a0walks. As mentioned earlier, he’s more adept at suppressing\u00a0memories about which he’s less certain, like the ones with his wife and his father and Kenny. Less insistent, those memories drift in and drift away, and Futh walks on, doomed.<\/p>\n
I would be very happy if this book won this year’s Booker prize.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Trevor reviews Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse<\/em>. Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7834,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[353,800],"tags":[1033,1070,551],"coauthors":[505],"class_list":["post-7791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alison-moore","category-book-reviews","tag-1033","tag-2012-booker-prize","tag-booker-prize"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/The-Lighthouse.jpg?fit=344%2C530&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-21F","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7791"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19542,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7791\/revisions\/19542"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7791"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=7791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}