The Lighthouse by Alison Moore – A book review

Language Teachers often make their learners read a text and ask them to summarise it or provide a gist; the reading sub-skill is called ‘Reading for gist’. The Lighthouse does exactly the opposite, if you ask me. The epigraph more or less provides the gist and then Alison Moore expands it to create her story.

She became a tall lighthouse sending out kindly beams which some took for welcome instead of  warnings against the rocks.

- Muriel Spark, ‘The Curtain Blown by the Breeze’ - Epigraph

Alison Moore’s story, long-listed for the Man Booker, is an allegorical tale about Futh, a middle-aged man recently separated from his infidel wife Angela. Futh thinks a walking holiday will help and hence he travels to Germany from the U.K. He’s been on a walking trip once as a child, with his father.  The infidelity of his wife and her deserting him are not the only painful thoughts running on his mind. He hasn’t had the best of childhoods and has seen duplicity and adultery in abundance as a child. All the thoughts of his mother leaving his father and him, of the adulteries of his father, of Gloria – the lady neighbor, of Kenny – the only friend he talks about and of Angela of course – a girl he always looked up to and looked out for, only to be ignored, and is now his wife and soon will cease to be. Apart from the emptiness, he always carries with him the silver lighthouse, a perfume bottle, which wasn’t supposed to be his.

I remember what my father had once said when I was a child and a moth entered through our window and was desperately buzzing against the tube-light. I had wanted to drive it away, but my father said “Leave it alone; it’s come to die.” And I did find it lying dead on the floor the next day. I have encountered many moths and other insects since then, devoted and obsessed with the light, being wasted to the same fate, either eaten by the slimy tongue of a predator or restlessly tiring themselves to death. The moths, and other such nocturnal insects, it is said, seek to travel by the shining light of the moon, by a method called transverse orientation (just like humans keep the North Star in a certain position to know where they are). And the electric illumination confuses them. Stupid insects. Just like stupid humans – we only think we are intelligent until proven wrong by an upper hand. We seek lighthouses to save us; we travel to our end!

And Ester is the other character Alison Moore freely writes about. She’s the owner’s wife, of a hotel that Futh has booked as part of his travel holiday. Another moth that has chosen the light-bulb instead of the moon. Coincidences and misfortunes then ensue and you see Futh, and sometimes Ester, inadvertently being enticed by the shining light of the allegorical lighthouse, fluttering desperately against the light without being aware of any dangers lurking.

Alison Moore’s symbolic writing renders an uncanny feel to her story. Like the moths and lighthouse, Ester’s Venus Flytraps too allude to a mystery of alluring, capture and doom. I liked this simple novella; the language is simple but the meaning is full of allusions, hinting at, building implicitly layer upon layer of a suspense of misfortune that you earlier ignored or overlooked.  

So, does Futh ultimately receive a welcome or does he, not realizing, ignore the warnings against the rocks? It is ultimately Futh’s silver lighthouse that substantiates the epigraph – finally literally.

Next time I see a moth, I know what I'll call it.

My rating: 4/5

Image Copyrights:

Book cover - © https://canongate.co.uk/books/2041-the-lighthouse/

Alison Moore - © https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/04/books/review/alison-moore-the-lighthouse.html