Month: September 2024

The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter, by Hazel Gaynor

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I first heard of Hazel Gaynor through her partnership with Heather Webb. They are co-authors of a number of delightful novels, including Meet Me in Monaco about Grace Kelly’s wedding. Here, Gaynor again gives us historical fiction based on real events. In one of two braided stories, twenty-two-year-old Grace Darling helps her father operate the Longstone Lighthouse on the Farne Islands in Northeast England. The family lives there, as well as being responsible for the light itself.

My sister Thomasin used to say she imagined the stairwell was a long vein running from the heart of the lighthouse. In one way or another, we have all attached human qualities to these old stone walls so that it has become another member of the family, not just a building to house us.

When a terrible storm erupts in 1838, Grace and her parents are the only ones home, her brothers elsewhere. When the paddle steamer Forfarshire is wrecked on the rocks, she insists that she and her father should try to rescue the survivors despite the raging sea and high winds. That feat made her famous, to her dismay, bringing reporters, tourists, and portrait painters to their previously lonely outpost.

One hundred years later, nineteen-year-old Matilda finds herself banished to another lighthouse in Newport, Rhode Island, to spare her parents back in England the shame of her unwed pregnancy. The lighthouse is run by a distant relative, a grim, reclusive woman.

As Matilda tries to find a way to connect to Harriet, she becomes intrigued by the lighthouse itself and soon begins to learn about its history and operation. In a trove of family artifacts she learns about her ancestor, Grace Darling. She’s also curious about Harriet’s mysteries and secrets.

The 1938 New England Hurricane, one of the deadliest and most destructive ever to hit the United States, requires both women to summon reserves of courage and love if they and the lighthouse are to survive.

In spite of the hurricanes and other tragedies, this novel was the absorbing comfort read I was looking for. I couldn’t help but cheer on these women who worked so hard and set themselves such high standards. The relationships within the families and with those in the wider world were presented with nuance and depth.

I might have liked a little more development of some of the secondary characters, but that’s a minor quibble. There were a few anachronisms in each of the time periods, which gave me a chuckle.

Still, I treasured the insights about what it takes to operate a lighthouse in each time period, and the attendant duties, such as rescuing shipwrecked people. I had no idea that women had been lighthouse keepers, though—of course—why not?

Like Gatsby and Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsey, I used to live with a distant light, a lighthouse on the Chesapeake Bay that lit my bedroom and dreams for years. I once tried to swim to it. It seemed so close! But it was not; it was beyond my power to reach.

So Gaynor had me at “lighthouse.” Then came the bonus of just the sort of story I was looking for: one that held my attention, gave me a break from the anxieties of current events, and even taught me some things I didn’t know.

Have you read a novel or a nonfiction book about a lighthouse and/or its keeper?

Burning Questions, by Margaret Atwood

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Subtitled Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021, this is Atwood’s third collection of essays, speeches, book introductions, and reviews. What astonished me was how readable this heterogeneous collection is. Of course, we have Atwood’s voice throughout: intelligent, calm, learned, self-deprecating, and witty.

In today’s world, where so many people value opinions and beliefs over fact, it is a huge relief to communicate with someone who actually believes in science. Both of her parents were scientists–an entomologist and a nutritionist–and she spent much of her youth in the woods of Northern Ontario. She talks about the family pulling over when an infestation was spotted so that they could collect the invading critters. “Other families stopped for ice-cream cones. Ours stopped for infestations.”

That early influence shows in her concern with the threats to our environment, both in her fiction and her nonfiction, including a number of pieces in this collection. She writes of how this concern fueled her Oryx & Crake trilogy and her MaddAddam trilogy, as well as a moving tribute to Rachel Carson, calling her “a pivotal figure of the twentieth century” and “Saint Rachel.”

Another theme that threads through this collection is the way autocracies try to silence writers and control women. She has been a force in founding Pen Canada and acted as its president in the 1980s. In “If We Don’t Defend Free Speech, We Live in Tyranny” she writes about the attack on Salman Rushdie and the murder of translator Hotoshi Igarashi. In another piece she states that “There is nothing that repressive governments desire more than imposed silence . . . secrecy is an important tool not only of power but of atrocity.”

She generously continues to write about The Handmaid’s Tale, noting that “absolutist governments have always taken an inordinate interest in the reproductive capabilities of women.” She adds that writing a dystopia from a woman’s point of view “does not make The Handmaid’s Tale a ‘feminist dystopia,’ except insofar as giving a woman a voice and an inner life will always be considered ‘feminist’ by those who think women ought not to have these things.”

These pieces are not all darkness with a glimmer of wit. In “Literature and the Environment” she writes that “as long as we have hope—and we still do have hope—we will be telling stories, and—if we have the time and the materials—we’ll be setting them down; because the telling of stories, and the wish to listen to them, transmit them, and derive meaning from them, is built into us as human beings.”

Indeed, the pieces I most appreciated were about how essential the arts are to our well-being and about writing in particular. Parsing out her approach to these short pieces taught me so much about her methodology. Often she starts with a clear statement of purpose: “I’ll divide my talk into three parts, and I’ll even tell you what they are, just so you know what’s coming.” That’s from a speech honoring the Department of Forestry’s centennial. I’m touched by how, despite her blockbuster status, she’s willing to turn up and speak at so many events.

After the statement of purpose, she wanders here and there in the best tradition of essay-writing. She includes asides, rhetorical questions, digressions, allusions. She explores the question without answering it, instead opening our minds—gently and respectfully. I also especially appreciated the pieces about other authors and about her late husband, author Graeme Gibson: both joyful moments and mor trying times as he drifted deeper into dementia.

While some readers may be unnerved by this collection’s length, diversity, and chronological structure (rather than thematic), I found it a joy to read. Most of the pieces are quite short, making it a perfect bedtime book: you can read a few pieces and chuckle at her quips before you turn out the light.

I’m grateful to Atwood for collecting these pieces—no small task—and putting them out for us to absorb. In fact, for a more global understanding of the issues facing us, their interconnectedness, and how we can move forward, this book cannot be beat.

What have you read by Margaret Atwood? Her novels, poems, and/or essays?

Oracle Night, by Paul Auster

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I’ve been meaning to read Auster’s novels for a while and even have a couple of his books on my to-be-read shelf. However, I decided to start with this short one from the library.

As Brooklyn novelist Sidney Orr recovers from a life-threatening illness, he begins to walk around his neighborhood. Attracted to a Chinese stationery shop he’d never noticed before, he is drawn to a blank notebook with a blue cover. For the first time since the onset of his illness, he enters his tiny writing room and begins writing in the notebook.

The story pouring out of him, which he titles Oracle Night, tells of a New York editor who one day simply up and leaves his life, traveling by random chance to St. Louis. There Nick meets Ed, an elderly cab driver who is in poor health. Finding his wife—thinking him dead—has canceled his credit cards, Nick begins working for Ed, helping him reorder his collection of telephone books stored in an underground bunker.

Meanwhile, Sidney’s marriage is suffering; his wife Grace is behaving oddly. His friend and mentor John Trause, twenty-some years older and a longtime friend of Grace and her family, is acting strange as well. Trause (yes, an anagram) had been the one to suggest the story behind Oracle Night to Sidney, based on a brief incident in The Maltese Falcon. Even more mysterious things begin to happen, such as Grace dreaming about Sidney’s story and Sidney himself disappearing from his study when he is certain he’s been there all along.

Auster includes footnotes of varying length, usually containing backstory about a person or incident, which amused me. I also enjoyed the many literary references. So it was fun to read, though the characters were rather flat, and the novel more of a production to appreciate than a story to immerse oneself in. The similarities between the characters and Auster himself and the whole fiction-versus-reality theme seem a bit old hat, even for 2003 when this novel was first published.

In the summary above I’ve barely scratched the surface of the many interwoven layers of plot in this story within story within story. I did appreciate the resulting semi-chaos and the way it reflected Sidney’s growing distrust of reality. However, the various layers never quite cohered, and the turn to melodrama at the end rather ruined the book for me.

Will I try another Auster novel? Sure. Can you recommend a good one for me to read next?