She thought of it as falling. Weightless. Disbelieving. Waiting to be caught but nobody ever did, for years and years and on it went and down she fell and there were no resolutions, no clarity or closure. [p. 22]
Last year's other novel about inexplicably-abandoned lighthouses: I loved Natasha Pulley's The Kingdoms inordinately, and hestitated to read this for fear of dissonant overlap. But the territory is quite different. The Lamplighters is set in the 1970s (when three lighthousekeepers disappear from the Maiden, a lighthouse just visible from the Cornish coast) and the 1990s (when a bestselling author interviews the women left behind, hoping to finally unravel the mystery of the mens' disappearance). Stonex shows us what each of the men were thinking, in those last days, and how each of the women have dealt with two decades of the liminal state, the never-ending liminal state, between disaster and resolution. There's a secret affair (or is there?) and a past tragedy, an uncaring corporation, two clocks stopped at 8:45, a locked door... In some ways this is a locked-room mystery. How did the men disappear? What became of them? Trident, who run the lighthouses, maintain that the Supernumerary -- Vince, who's done time and prefers confinement and isolation to the wider world -- did away with his two superiors. Jenny, wife of Bill the assistant keeper, nurtures a grudge against Arthur's wife Helen and hints darkly at a breakdown of the working relationship between Bill and Arthur. But the men, out there fifteen miles from land, battered by storms, cut off from radio contact by bad weather, constantly avoiding friction ... what do they see? Who comes to visit them?
The Lamplighters is based on the disappearance of three men from the Eilean Mòr lighthouse, in the Outer Hebrides, in the winter of 1900. That has never been explained, either. I loved Stonex's prose, and found the story intriguing, though not all the characters were likeable. Stonex is at her best when writing about the natural world, and especially the sea. She writes, of the smell, 'briny, clean, like vinegar kept in the fridge': odd, original, true. I didn't altogether like the one-sided 'interview' format (only answers, no questions) in which the women's stories were primarily told. I did appreciate the Gothic undertones of lighthouse life, and the inexplicable moments in each man's story: maybe supernatural, maybe psychological, maybe a waking dream. Was there a mechanic? Was there a silver man? Was there something bright, falling, or a storm, or a white bird?
Note that there is a brief, horrific incident involving a child and a dog.
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