I’m not much one for bandwagons (I’ve yet to see Star Wars
and I hid for most of the Olympics), and life rarely offers time for such onerous
tasks as book reviews. But occasionally (here, and again here) I’m compelled to
such appraisal. Alison Moore’s debut novel, The
Lighthouse is that rare thing, a seemingly quiet story, simply told, but
one with searing energy and an unsettling poignancy at its heart.
There’s an intensity here, one that emerges, not from gimmick
or artifice, but from the lacunae Moore gives the reader. (It was no surprise to learn she is an accomplished short
story writer, a form where the prose must work obscenely hard without appearing to,
where it ruptures its boundaries, the whole always greater than the sum of its
parts. Carver would have loved this book.)
Moore’s control -
and the sense of claustrophobia this engenders - evokes Kafka at his best, the aching pathos redolent
of an Iñárritu film. (Perhaps he’ll
adapt it.)
Themes of loneliness, of how the tyranny of our pasts never
quite leaves us, abound, the diffident Futh’s circuitous walk along the Rhine
an apt metaphor. Motifs woven in – fragrance, infidelity, the fug of cigarette
smoke – yield an ambient resonance that unspools throughout.
As the book’s two strands inevitably converge again, Moore
sets up a denouement that’s both delicate and shocking, despite the dramatic
irony the reader is armed with.
I’ll leave to others the tiresome debate of how literary this year’s
shortlist is, how literary-less last year’s was, of readability. I always
thought there were two kinds of books: those written well and the other kind.
So, back to the bandwagon this book so deservedly finds
itself on. Don’t assume it’s there by proxy, propping up the more heavyweight luminaries
on the list: Moore’s novel would be
a more than worthy winner.
