The Lighthouse: A Novel by Michael D. O’Brien, Post #6

This is the sixth and final post on Michael D. O’Brien’s novel, The Lighthouse: A Novel.

You can find Post #1 here. 

Post #2 here. 

Post #3 here. 

Post #4 here.

Post #5 here. 

 

 

 

My chapter by chapter thoughts and discussions can be found in my previous five posts.  This post consists solely of my review of the book at Goodreads.

 

Goodreads Review

 

I gave this only two stars.  I did very much want to enjoy and praise this book.  This is my first Michael D. O’Brien novel, and frankly I did not know what to expect.  I had heard of him and had wanted to read one of his novels.  After all he may be the most distinguished Catholic writer of fiction writing today.  But his more well-known works can run anywhere from 500 to 1000 pages, I never had the time to commit to such a long read.  This read was a very manageable 200 pages.

 

This review will have spoilers.

 

As you can read in the novel’s blurb, the premise of the novel is we follow the adult life of Ethan McQuarry, a young man in charge of taking care of a lighthouse off the coast of Cape Breton Island in Canada.  Ethan lives with a childhood trauma of having his father abandon him before he was born, raised poorly by a solitary mother, who once he reached an age where he can fend for himself, abandons him too.  When the solitary job of a lighthouse keeper becomes available, he takes it, seeing it as a natural fit for his loner sensibility.  Notably, the lighthouse is situated on a strip of land that is an island at high tide but connected with a walkable strip on low tide.

As a lighthouse keeper he has the time to develop the skill of carpentry and woodworking.  When a dilapidated boat washes up on his island after a storm, Ethan refurbishes the boat.  The boat will eventually become significant.  Ethan also starts sculpting wooden statues from washed up driftwood, most significantly he sculpts men, women, and children who he calls his family.

The plot of the novel can be seen as Ethan’s encounters to what may be called intruders to his island.  There is an iconic, even parablelike, quality to the story.  Two intruders are significant.  Both are doppelgangers to Ethan’s character.  One is Skillsaw Hurley (Skillsaw because he cut off three of his fingers with a power saw), also with childhood trauma, who is Ethan’s double if he had not grown to be societally functional.  Ross, Ethan’s other doppelganger, is a young man who is Ethan’s double because he too has had his father abandon him, but has grown with a good adopting father so that his trauma has not affected his personality.  Unlike Ethan he is very jovial, gregarious, and socially adjusted.

Now on the surface, this all sounds interesting, and the premise of the novel is great.  Alas the execution is terrible.  The flaws just mounted on top of each other.  First, the characters, despite their premises, are really cartoon figures.  There is no depth to them.  O’Brien gives us the exposition of their background with no dramatic or narrative backing.  Second for the central character to be credibly traumatized such trauma requires some narrative development, either through flashback (think Faulkner), through character interplay (think Dickens), or through straight narrative (think of Jane in the early chapters of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre).  We have to understand his experience, not just be told.  The whole novel rests on Ethan’s personality, and we have only cursory exposition to know how he was formed.

Third, the central theme of the modern world having degenerated because of its lack of Christianity, while a theme having weight and importance, is delineated in a superficial way.  Characters who represent the modern world are even more cartoonish than the central characters.  The freakish, rude granddaughter, with the blue spiked hair, nose ring, and startling clothes, of a conservative elderly Japanese couple is contrasted against her grandparents for us to show the generational decay.  Really?  How many people in the modern world walk around with blue spiked hair and nose rings?  A good writer should be “steel manning” the opposition argument, not “straw manning.”  The contrasts between the characters with traditional values against those who have “modern” values are not very compelling.  Frankly, and I don’t know if the author intended this or not, the motif of mothers in the novel not able to function without husbands borders misogyny.

Fourth, the characterization of showing the hole in Ethan’s heart from his abandonment as a child, is poorly executed.  Ethan’s wooden carvings of family figures is an interesting detail, but when he starts talking to them and calling the mother figure his “wife” and the boy his “child” that calls him “papa,” it just comes across as creepy.  I don’t think O’Brien intends to portray Ethan as creepy.  He is supposed to be a hero with perhaps his childhood trauma as a flaw.  If O’Brien had just left the story with Ethan psychologically compelled to create family figures, I think the reader would have gotten the psychological connection, and it would have been appropriate.  But he takes it a step too far.  The strangest is when Ethan has an imaginary conversation with a real-life woman he met several years earlier and then when “glancing across the room at his artificial wife, he felt a momentary guilt of infidelity.”  Infidelity to a wooden stature?  That’s just silly and awful.  If O’Brien was after some sort of psychological insight to Ethan’s character, this is just poorly done.

Fifth, large swaths of the novel are boring.  The Skillsaw chapter was fascinating because O’Brien interweaved fascinating details that brought out Skillsaw’s distinct personality.  But that was just one chapter.  There were four chapters, nearly forty percent of the novel, where Ross and Ethan were seen working together, first repairing and then launching the boat and then building a workroom for Ethan’s woodworking.  There is an emphasis on the manual labor, and I understand the narrative goal of showing male bonding and even the father/son type relationship between the two.  The narrative goal was proper, but again the execution was lacking.  Unlike the Skillsaw chapter, the details were tedious without opening up elements of their characters.  Perhaps this is subjective on my part but given the lack of narrative to their early formative lives I found I really didn’t care about the manual work.  I do realize that the manual work, even the craftsmanship, carries added significance in this novel, but I have to care about the characters first before I find interest in the work.

Lastly, I could not believe this is how O’Brien brought the story to a conclusion: by having Ethan drown in a happenstance storm?  There are so many unfulfilled lines of narrative.  What about Catherine MacInnis, or some other woman to be Ethan’s wife?  What about that hole in his heart for a spouse and children?  What about his carvings and artistry?  What about that work room he and Ross spent a quarter of the novel constructing?  What about his life in the just purchased lighthouse that he spent his life savings on and now has ownership?  What about his relationship to his biological son that he discovered and now loves?  What about Ethan’s nascent Catholicism?  All of these threads could have been tied together by a religious conversion and perhaps wedding.  All his internal demons brought about by that childhood trauma that governed the length of the story could have been brought to rest.

This ending had nothing to do with the story of the novel.  It is simply a Deus ex machina ending where the author by shear plot device brings the novel to a conclusion.  In addition, it is purely a Hollywood movie type ending, packed with schmaltzy heroic action and a self-sacrificing final act that makes the hero into a Christ figure.  Ethan unintentionally even leaves behind a note that Ross will one day read and learn the secret of their relationship.  This is Hollywood sentimentality.

If you want to read this novel, there are enough positive reviews to justify picking it up.  I for one did not find this worthy.  Perhaps I’m just an outlier.  Perhaps I’m just wrong.  If you read it and you disagree, let me know.  Maybe you can change my mind.