‘The Lighthouse’ by Alison Moore
A funny thing happened to me the other day. I was in my regular Starbucks in Newcastle upon Tyne, one which occupies the lower portion of a vast Georgian building nestled in the long, looming shadow of Grey’s Monument, ordering a grande four-shot skinny latte (I was tired and my eyes even more puffy than usual) when the friendly barista asked me to remind her of my name. “Its Alison,” I said cheerily, and a look of sudden recognition lit her face. “I knew it began with an A,” she added, pasting the tiny paper ticket onto the espresso machine. “Although, I was just about to call you Angela…” Oh to have seen what my puffy little face looked like at that moment, for Angela is (or rather was, six years on I’m still not sure what to do with my tenses) my late mother’s name, and one that I have often been christened with at weddings and funerals (mostly the latter) by semi-drunken family members who, following whatever mystical juices they have ingested, can no longer tell the difference. I choose to see it as a compliment…a giant, overwhelming compliment. But what does any of this name-related malarkey have to do with The Lighthouse, you ask? Well, to add another dimension to the Alison-Angela intrigue, the author of the novel is one Alison Moore and one of the story’s key players is named Angela. So, is this kismet, or just coincidence? Hell, who knows, but please allow me to stop gassing like this and start discussing the actual book…
The Lighthouse is Alison Moore’s debut novel and it was published little over a month ago. And, in what must feel like a tremendous achievement for a first-time novelist, the book has found its way onto the shortlist for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, along with Booker mainstays such as Hilary Mantel and Will Self. Yet in comparison to Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies, the sequel to the 2009 Booker Prize-winning behemoth Wolf Hall, Alison Moore’s first novel is, at just 182 pages, a mere sliver of a book. And yet its brilliance belies its brevity. The Lighthouse follows a solitary man (no Neil Diamond reference intended) named Futh as he ventures across the North Sea towards Germany for a restorative break. As the story progresses we learn that Futh is newly separated from the aforementioned Angela, and though we never meet her outright we do learn a great deal about her through his melancholy rememberings. In this sense she is an important unseen plot device, rather like Maris Crane in Frasier but more an object of longing and sadness than of ridicule. I have absolutely no idea why I’ve chosen to make this particular parallel, but, hopefully you can see what I’m getting at. Back to the point, when Futh arrives at his lodgings in western Germany, the aptly named Hellhaus - that’s lighthouse in English - he encounters some rather unsavoury characters and in doing so is prompted to take a voyage of self-discovery through the Rhineland, a voyage that has ominous yet devastating results.
The Lighthouse is a melancholy and rather unsettling little book, written in a spare yet self-assured style which makes the reader feel as though they are privy to something extraordinary and simultaneously very uncomfortable. The prose is low-key, as is the plot itself, however Alison Moore’s hand is so confident and her ideas so well executed that you almost feel as though you are observing as opposed to just reading. And with chapter headings such as Breasts, Stewed Apples, Romance and Cigarette Smoke, you can rest assured that you are reading something otherworldly and esoteric - The Lighthouse wears its weirdness well. The sense of isolation inferred by the title is more than reflected in the text itself, for not only has Futh recently separated from his wife, we also discover that his own mother left when he was young, leaving Futh with only his father for company, company that seems to have been of particular detriment to him as a person.
Overall, my only legitimate complaint to make about The Lighthouse is that it doesn’t come replete with a scratch-and-sniff function: scents of all kinds, from violets to camphor to household disinfectant, play a critical role in the book and are almost a kind of character all of their own. To have sampled these fragrances first-hand would have simply topped off the experience. Come Booker Prize announcement time on October 16th I’ll be rooting for The Lighthouse.
This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in September 2012.