The Lighthouse was one of the surprise inclusions on this year’s Booker longlist, partly because it’s a debut novel, but mainly because it’s published by a two-person publishing house, Salt.
You wouldn’t guess either from reading the book, which is a beautifully written but unremittingly bleak look at middle-age and a melancholy yearning for the past.
One half of the story focuses on Futh, a timid man on a ‘holiday’ walking in Germany after his wife, Angela, has left him. This loss has caused him to retreat into similar memories of his mother, also called Angela, leaving his alcoholic father, and the subsequent trip he and his father made to Germany.
The second half of the story, and the less compelling one, centres around Esther, the ageing, co-owner of a hotel alongside her violently unpleasant husband Bernard, the brother of her sometime fiancée. Futh’s brief stays at the hotel (once towards the start, once at its conclusion) coincide with her dissolution into, yes, alcohol and infidelity.
In short, no one is having a good time. Neither do they at any point in the book. Futh’s and Esther’s memories are essentially of relationships in decay, the moments of small tragedy that led them to the precipice.
This is also a novel loaded with metaphor: Futh carries with him a small silver perfume holder in the shape of a lighthouse once owned by his mother, and his mother left his father after a trip to a lighthouse, while Esther has a wooden lighthouse that reminds her of her more glamorous youth; Futh collects stick insects which are now left with his ex, while Esther keep Venus Fly Traps; then there is the Oedipal inference of the two Angelas and the fact that the hotel resides in a town named Hellhaus (the German word for ‘lighthouse’, but also with an English-language implication).
In truth, all these metaphors are pretty heavy-handed. Also, Moore never allows a single chink of light into her story – Futh finds freedom and release in the great outdoors, but winds up battered and broken by it. Even Esther’s self-destructive cheating is ineffectual on men once she’s placed beside the attractive new hotel bar girl.
Bleakness is fine, but does lead to realism issues with the characters. Why, for example, does Angela marry Futh in the first place? We’re told they have a big wedding party during which he goes to bed early, so what were her friends and family saying to her about him? How did it even get to that point? We never know.
Yet Moore has considerable talent. The novel is carried by the superb, spare quality of the writing, which creates a queasily creepy feeling from page one (a fine scene set on a rolling ferry) and never lets up. It is full of small details and expert character observation that add up to a kind of domestic existential angst – Ken Loach meets Jean Paul Sartre. The narrative drives forward with pace and, at only just over 180 pages, she knows when to start and end her story. You might just need a good bath and a walk in the sun afterwards, that’s all.
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