A book review of The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Tóibín.
Colm Tóibín is one of those gifted writers who is able to write moving, interesting, stirring and striking prose with such ease and with such a sparce use of vocabulary. And this book is no exception.
The Blackwater Lightship is the sad tale of Declan Devereux, a young man dying of Aids in Ireland in the 1990s. He had kept his illness a secret from his sister and his estranged mother and grandmother until the very last, when, I feel, he felt the need for familial completeness in his last weeks. At times very moving, at times frustrating, but never dull, this fine work shows how grief and loss can build bridges. Tempered, however, by the sad fact that tragedy has to sometimes be that catalyst.
There are some brilliantly drawn out characters. The dotty grandmother, the distant mother, Declan’s friends; Paul, the solid dependable type and Larry, a funny, effervescent architect, the perfect foil for Paul. And Helen, the daughter, Declan’s sister, a woman with deep seated grudges. Understandable grudges, or ones that have caused her two young boys to miss out on their extended family?
Shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1999, it lost out to Disgrace—J.M. Coetzee— that year, the first author to win twice. And rightfully so; Disgrace is a superb piece of work, a savage and disturbing book that I found hard to accept. Challenging reading from a gifted writer.
Blackwater Lightship is my second Colm Tóibín book, the first being Brooklyn. It’s a close run thing, but if pushed I would have to choose Brooklyn ahead of Blackwater Lightship. The prose is not as slick, but the story is better. A young women from Ireland emigrates to the U.S. and falls in love. Just after she marries she discovers that her adored sister has died. She returns to Ireland where her mother does everything that she can to keep her from returning home to her husband, making her choose between duty and love. Does she return, does she stay in Ireland? It’s one of those books that as you proceed through it you almost can’t bare not to know, and that you find yourself reading faster and faster, despite not wanting it to end. The conundrum of an excellent plot. It’s why we read.
As a writer I like Colm Tóibín, and will read more of his work over time. The trouble is, of course, that there are too many books… and too little time!
Colm has an important lesson to teach a writer. It is that, in order to effect a gripping story full of vivid and three-dimensional people, one doesn’t need to write fancy prose full of bewildering words that never get used by real people, or turn out pages and pages of description. It is that you just need to chose the words that you do use very, very carefully.
And that’s what Colm Tóibín does, in this case to great effect. Worth a read, but check out Brooklyn as well.
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