The Lighthouse: A Novel by Michael D. O’Brien, Post #4

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

You can find Post #1 here.  

Post #2 here.  

Post #3 here.  

 

 

Summary

Chapters 7 & 8

Chapter 7: The Return

Over the winter with Ethan in his isolation again, he made a new carving, now of a boy riding on the back of an arching dolphin.  Suddenly a visitor dropped by.  To Ethan’s surprise it was Ross Campbell again.  Upon being invited in, Ross discovered the new carving and was taken in at Ethan’s skill.  Ross had also brought a gift for Ethan, a wind generator that could help with the heat in the lighthouse.  As Ross was setting it up, he discovered another of Ethan’s carvings, the boy on top of his father’s shoulders.  Again, Ethan was amazed at the workmanship.  Eventually Ross discovered all of Ethan’s carvings.  This led to Ross proposing that they build a workshop for Ethan and a place to store the “masterpieces,” a home for Ethan’s wooden family.  At dinner, Ross gave Ethan a beer which made him tipsy but happy.

Chapter 8: The Bell

 With Ross taking the lead in the construction project, the two worked together to build a new floor in the cottage building adjacent to the lighthouse. The two went into town to get all the supplies.  During the process of working together the two grew in male bonding.  On a day of rest, the two decided to go to Wreck Island where Ross could do some scuba diving.  At Wreck Island there was a sunken old sailing boat and Ross went down to it in his scuba gear.  On a second dive, Ross wrapped a cable around a metal object, and when they winched the cable up they discovered the metal object, about the size of a melon, was the ship’s bell.  The bell was made of silver, and they cleaned it up with a chemical electrical procedure.  After Ross going into town and learning about the history of the ship, he brought back pizza and beer to celebrate.  Then they finished the construction project.  In the process, Ross revealed of his mother and stepfather, which made Ethan reflective on his own childhood.  Ethan did not want Ross to go. 

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Thoughts and observations on Chapter 7, “The Return.”

Unlike the other characters in the novel who come by and then depart, seemingly for good, Ross returns in the very next chapter.  Ross Campbell is clearly the version of Ethan had Ethan not had childhood trauma, a second doppelganger.  Skillsaw is Ethan’s doppelganger if Ethan had developed into a deviant and roguish way.  Ross is his doppelganger if Ethan was socially adjusted.  Ethan is in between the spectrum of the two.

Unlike Skillsaw, Ross will play a larger role in the novel.  Unlike Skillsaw, Ross is not that interesting a character.

Frankly, I did not understand fully how this wind generator worked or what it even looked like.  The inordinate amount of details of setting it up were not particularly interesting.  I guess the point of all the detail was to dramatize the male bonding being formed as they worked together.  In my opinion, it was not executed well.  Yes, you need to show them working together, but there has to be some psychological depth to the action or there is no reader engagement.  It’s just action, and who cares about the technical details of setting up the wind turbine.

Ross discovers the wood carvings and doesn’t find them creepy.  This is an outsider’s perception, so O’Brien intends them to be of normal consequence.  Am I the only one that finds them creepy?  I guess the creepiness was not that they were carvings of a family but that they talked to Ethan and Ethan was attached to them in an emotional way beyond that of art.  I guess Ross is not aware of that. 

Ethan getting drunk on one beer was funny.  Nothing like beer for male bonding. 

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Frances Comment:

Do you think O’Brien seriously limited himself; two men, banal conversation, nautical objects . . . The only writer I can think of who could make the scenes come alive is Ernest Hemingway.

My Reply to Frances:

That has crossed my mind. I think he tried to capture the Spartan life of a lighthouse keeper through a restrained narrative style. Also Ethan's personality is so restrained that perhaps the prose and narrative reflects Ethan. Though I have to admit I don't know what his narrative style is in other novels.

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Thoughts and observations on Chapter 8, “The Bell.”

The postmistress pointing out that Ethan and Ross could be brothers will have ramifications further in the novel.  I didn’t pick up on it at the time of reading.

There was less detail in this chapter of the construction, though there was actually more work.  This worked much better from a reader perspective.  You didn’t need all that minutia of detail in the other chapters.  Summary description with zooming into some detail was all that was needed.

Bathing in the nude in the bay since there was no shower is another symbolic male bonding action.  So if there are no showers, how does Ethan bathe in the winter time?

I thought this might have been the best prose in the novel so far.

 

Wreck Isle was hardly an island. In fact, it was a projectile of black rock less than thirty feet wide at low tide. No living thing grew on it save mollusks. At high tide it was invisible, its guano deposits daily washed away. Between it and the mainland there was a narrow channel through which a fishing trawler would safely pass but no larger boat could survive. The water depth was only three to four fathoms over a cruel array of granite teeth. Embedded in these was the wreck of the old sailing ship that had foundered in a century long past. Whatever remained of it gave testimony to a severe impact, and a subsequent beating and shattering that had left little but the great keel beam and the remnant of ribs that had settled permanently between jaws in the undersea landscape.

For a novel set on an exotic coastline with a salient lighthouse, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of lyrical prose.  The setting just calls for lyricism.  Compare the prose of Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse,” which has a similar setting.  Her prose is immensely lyrical.  That is not to say that O’Brien’s prose is bad.  It is not.  It’s more “blue-collar” if you will.

Here’s something interesting.  When Ross comes up from his first dive having inspected the wreck of the ship he points out the ship’s workmanship.

 

“Oh wow, Ethan,” he gasped. “What a ship she must have been. Like you said, there’s not much left, but you can see the incredible mastery that went into building her.”

“The incredible mastery that went into building her” is not exactly what would be my observation of a wrecked ship.  Remember though, the two have been working at building a room, not exactly building a ship but it dovetails with their work.  The theme of craft has run throughout the novel.

The revelation of the wrecked ship’s name led to the knowledge of what happened to the ship.  The one survivor we will learn will be the progenitor family line of a character we have met.  The island from which the ship was named was also a nesting ground for puffins.  The universe of the novel has many interconnections, which is what one would expect from a Catholic author.

The talk of Ross’s family reveals similarities and differences.  Both were born of single mothers but Ross had a stepfather and Ethan did not.  There is this little bit of exchange that highlights the differences between the men.  Ross explains about his mother’s anxiety over him.

 

“My mother’s a terrible worrier, you see. If she didn’t hear from me, she’d have the whole province turning over stones in search of my dead body.”

 

   “And your father?”

 

   “My stepfather’s a sensible guy. He’s great, keeps Mum from going off the deep end.”

 

   “Stepfather?”

 

   “Yeah, I never knew my real father. Single-parent situation, you know.”

 

   “Oh. I’m sorry.”

The language to focus on is that Ross’s stepfather “keeps Mum from going off the deep end.”  This highlights the absence of Ethan’s father who by not being there to “keep” Ethan’s mother from “going off the deep end” caused Ethan’s childhood trauma.  This is certainly one of the themes of the novel, the significance of fatherhood.  From another perspective, this language rather belittles the mother’s role in raising children.  I can see women being offended at the wording of “going off the deep end” without a male to keep her in line.  Did O’Brien mean it in that way?  It’s one thing to say a father is needed in a family; it’s another to say a mother will go “off the deep end” if she doesn’t have a male around.  It’s possible that O’Brien endorses such an ideology.  It’s also possible he didn’t mean to make it sound that way but that he just wasn’t artful in delineating a nuanced characterization.  I don’t know which it is.  I do know that in ideological Christian circles (both Catholic and Protestant) there are people with this sort of male-centric ideology.  I don’t know where O’Brien fits in that.  Ethan’s inner thoughts at that moment expands on this.

 

And he was sorry, since his own circumstances were similar—minus the stepfather. He now thought of his mother and wondered, as he had countless times, where she was. Had she straightened out her life, gotten married, settled down, kicked the booze and other habits? Or died of them? Had she tried to find him, as he had tried to find her? In the end it came down to the truth that she had not been capable of bearing the weight of a child through life, of raising him. He was not wanted. Knew he was not wanted very early on. Though something in him understood that she had wanted to want him.

 

 She gave me life. She did her best.

Without a husband, Ethan’s mother “did her best” which was making a mess of it all.  The contrast of with and without a husband is significant.  Ethan’s inner thoughts substantiates a woman going off the deep end without a husband.  Is it intentional or lacking in narrative skill?  I’d like to hear people’s thoughts.

My other thought here is that we finally get more detail of Ethan’s childhood trauma.  To avoid being probed by Ross on his upbringing, Ethan goes off into another room to collect his thoughts.

 

Remembering the fatherless feeling, the longing to be picked up and tossed into the air and caught with a laugh, and carried on a shoulder ride as his father-protector strode fearless through the world. Remembering also how easily he might have grown up lopsided, gone in bad directions, but didn’t, because there had been a few good men scattered throughout his childhood. He thought of a social worker when he was four years old, who looked him straight in the eyes and said, “Ethan, things are hard for you at home right now. But I can see as plain as day that you’re going to grow up solid and true.” And meant it. And Ethan believed him.

We see there have been some good men in his childhood, and this perhaps is the reason Ethan did not go down the path of Skillsaw.  There is the male social worker here.  I’m not going to quote the very next paragraph but we see there a teacher that guided Ethan and a gym instructor and a supermarket manager and the boy’s club counselor.  All men I think, though I’m not sure about the teacher.  It comes in a context of male guidance, so we could probably assume male. 

This is what I think.  Just as a feminist writer has a rather two-dimensional view of relationships, this too has a two-dimensional view of relationship, albeit from the flip side.  These are opposite sides of ideologies, and ideologies do not capture life.

The culmination of this development gives us a glimpse of the novel as a possible bildungsroman. 

 

And he believed this too—feeding like a starving child on the definition of himself, the shapes that manhood might take. These men stole nothing from him and gave him everything, the affirmation he hungered for. The quantity of such encounters had not amounted to much, but their quality was of immeasurable value.

A bildungsroman is a novel of a character’s development from childhood into adulthood.  There are a lot of gaps missing, but it’s possible to piece together this novel as the development of Ethan from childhood to adulthood.

It’s kind of late in the novel to give us details from his childhood, and it’s still not fully developed.

The ending of the chapter was endearing.  Ross’s observation of Ethan’s solitude cuts to the center of Ethan’s trauma.  It leads to Ethan expressing the “most unguarded thing he had said in his life,” that he didn’t want Ross to leave. 

 

He liked the boy. He was congenial and, if the truth be told, a great help. It was more a case of not knowing how to deal with him: the habit of frequent verbal communication, the wit that invited counterwit, the starkness of his observations, those probing questions. In other circumstances and with other people, these qualities would be acceptable or admirable, or at least not invasive. But they had amassed into something that was confounding the order of Ethan’s world, giving him the sense that one whole wall of his life had tumbled down and left him exposed.

The male bonding we saw in the previous three chapters earns this expression from Ethan’s heart.

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Frances Comment:

You mention Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. I wondered if O’Brien chose his title with it in mind. Distance, memory, solitude, aspiration, the unattainable: doesn’t The Lighthouse suggest all of those? Ethan seems to me to have suffered some great trauma in childhood. I don’t know how else to explain his need for solitude and aversion to society. Just my thoughts at this point.

My Reply to Frances:

That is something I've wondered. They both have childhood scars as a theme. Not sure I would call Woolf's lighthouse childhood trauma, but it's along those lines. It is possible.

 

No question Ethan has suffered a trauma in childhood. His absent father and his whacky mother are the roots of the trauma. My issue with the novel is that he needed to supply more details, either through dialogue, flashback, stream of memories.

Frances’s Reply:

I agree, Manny. Once he started stream of consciousness, though, O’Brien would have had to use it throughout the novel, and he may not have wanted to do that. He seems to want to use mystery and clues and in that way build suspense toward a climax. I would like to know Ethan better — which I think is your point, too.

My Reply to Frances:

Perhaps it would have been a little different novel. But perhaps not. Ethan reflects on his past. All it would take is a pivot to a scene in the past. If you remember Dickens's A Christmas Carol, there were several of those scenes where Dickens is narrating Scrooge's past. It's just a pivot from the present time to a past scene.

Frances’s Reply to Me:

Manny, your example of Dickens and Scrooge is excellent. I think, too, that if O’Brien had wanted to reach very high, he could have used The Sound and the Fury as his model. Faulkner’s novel accomplishes what we’ve thought is missing: richer characters, fuller back story. But, again, O’Brien may not have been interested in taking on such a big endeavor.

My Reply to Frances:

The Sound and the Fury crossed my mind but I do think that would be a radical change to the novel. It would change the aesthetic he would be after. I don’t think the Scrooge like pivots would do that. And he wouldn’t need many, perhaps just one or two.

Kerstin Comment:

Wow! Manny, if you cannot figure out the McGiver contraption with your training, there is no hope for the rest of us, lol.

My Reply to Kerstin:

LOL. I really can’t make out what it is.

Kerstin Comment:

Manny wrote: "Without a husband, Ethan’s mother “did her best” which was making a mess of it all. The contrast of with and without a husband is significant. Ethan’s inner thoughts substantiates a woman going off the deep end without a husband. Is it intentional or lacking in narrative skill? I’d like to hear people’s thoughts."

The lack of background here is poor craftsmanship from my angle. That a woman “goes off the deep end” without a husband is an absurd broad brush assumption. Millions of women up and down the centuries have successfully raised families due to widowhood or abandonment, for example.
Now given the description we’ve been given of Ethan’s mother so far she must have been some kind of floozy not willing to take on the responsibility of a child. This is a woman, no matter how young, who is unwilling to rise to the occasion. Given this dynamic I am doubtful a husband could have had much influence in the long run. She would have run off, wedding band or no. 

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Retrospective Thoughts Post Reading of the Novel

One theme that is clear with that statement of “craftsmanship” that Ross makes when he has come up from underwater to view the shipwreck is that of male work and work ethos.  I think that might be the central theme.  It’s the reason for the extended scenes of Ross and Ethan working to create a work space. 

I do think O’Brien’s thought takes a dark turn with the belittling of the Ethan;s and Ross’s mothers.  I think a lot of O’Brien’s worldview is taken from an ideological wellspring. 

Sunday Meditation: The King of the Universe

We come to the end of times, metaphorically that is.  The end where the King takes command of His entire kingdom.  We come, in the full name of the feast day, to The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe.  We reach the end of the liturgical year, and today is still considered the Thirty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary time where Christ is acknowledged as king of heaven and earth, that is the entire universe.  I have written numerous times on this feast, on how it was established in 1925 by Pope Pius XI in his magisterial encyclical, Quas Primas, and even on the Year C readings where Dr. Brant Pitre explains how the day came about. 

I will delve into the Year C Gospel readings one more time.  The Gospel for this day comes from the Gospel of Luke where Christ on the cross is implored to come down and prove He is the Messiah by the “rulers,” the Pharisees, and the bad thief of the cross.  But the good thief, traditionally referred to as St. Dismas—yes, he is considered a saint—is repentant and acknowledges the proper role of Jesus’s kingdom.

 

Here is the Gospel passage.

 

The rulers sneered at Jesus and said,

"He saved others, let him save himself if he is the chosen one, the Christ of God."

Even the soldiers jeered at him.

As they approached to offer him wine they called out,

"If you are King of the Jews, save yourself."

Above him there was an inscription that read,

"This is the King of the Jews."

 

Now one of the criminals hanging there reviled Jesus, saying,

"Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us."

The other, however, rebuking him, said in reply,

"Have you no fear of God, for you are subject to the same condemnation?

And indeed, we have been condemned justly, for the sentence we received corresponds to our crimes, but this man has done nothing criminal."

Then he said,

"Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom."

He replied to him,

"Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise."

~Lk 23:35-43

 

I return to Archbishop Edward Weisenberger of Detroit for the exegetical homily.

 

“For those with the eyes of faith, how true a King, and how worthy of our full commitment and total devotion, how true a King who promises that with Him we are all on our way to a very royal glory.”

Again I am turning to someone I have never before included in my meditations.  This is Fr. Joe Dailey.  I think you’ll like this.

“TODAY you will be with me in paradise.”  That was outstanding.  I see that Fr. Joe has retired but still occasionally puts out a homiletic video.  But he has a good store of them from over the years.  I will probably tap into them every so often.  He goes on to say, “Paradise is the condition of integrated unity.”  The last two minutes of the homily was incredibly powerful.  Fr. Joe ends with, “TODAY this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” 

 

Sunday Meditation: "This is the King of the Jews."

 

For our hymn, let’s hear “To Jesus Christ, Our Sovereign King” from the Catholic Music Initiative.  

 

The Catholic Music Initiative is a group trying to “harmonizing tradition and faith through music.”  A worthy goal, and judging by this rendition accomplishing just that.

Faith Filled Friday: How Catholics Should Read the Bible

This is an essay I put together to read to my Adult Faith Formation class at my parish a few weeks ago.  I found that many were reading the Old Testament in a literal, denoted way as a fundamentalist Protestant would read it.  Actually this subject had come up frequently over the years I led our Faith Formation.  I decided to put it into an essay. 

 

###

The Bible is the inspired word of God.  It is God speaking to His people.

What does inspired mean?  It means that the Holy Spirit had a hand in the writer’s generation of the work.  It means that there is a Truth in the writing and then under the Holy Spirit the work was selected because as St. Paul says it “is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness so that one who belongs to God may be competent, equipped for every good work.”  (2 Tim 3:14)  No where does it say it has to be literally true.  It has to have truth. 

God talks to His people in various ways, in various forms of communication, that is in various genres of literature.  Some of the genres included are legend, history, moral laws, liturgical rubrics, prophecies, poetry, song, apocalyptic literature (dream states), maxims, fables, and more.  One of the most frequently found in the Bible is history, but it is not a history as the modern person would grasp.  It is a history that is focused on where the author prioritizes a moral to be learned over the exact facts of what happened.  The truth is the moral, not necessarily the facts.

Every genre speaks truth but it is the truth dictated by the form of the genre.  Truth is in one of the four modes to read the Old Testament: literal, spiritual (allegorical, moral, anagogical).  The text does not always provide truth in all four modes.  The writer is writing in a genre.

For a Catholic to read and understand the Old Testament requires you to read it as knowing the New Testament, that is in the light of Christ.  You have to know and understand Jesus to know what the meaning of the OT passage/book is, otherwise you will be reading it as a Jew, and even then you will be missing the cultural context of Judaism.  You cannot really understand the OT without understanding Christ first.

Christ overturns the OT Himself on more than one occasion. 

-The woman caught in adultery.  By OT laws she should have been stoned to death but Christ did not allow it.  Jesus doesn’t exactly say there but the implication was that the OT was lacking.

-But on divorce not only does Jesus overturn the OT but He explains the theology. 

Some Pharisees approached him, and tested him,* saying, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause whatever?”

He said in reply, “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’

and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?

So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no human being must separate.”

They said to him, “Then why did Moses command that the man give the woman a bill of divorce and dismiss [her]?”

He said to them, “Because of the hardness of your hearts Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. (Mat 19:3-8)

 

The key words “Moses permitted you.”  What Moses wrote down is not necessarily what God intended.  But God allowed it to be written down.  Why?  At least two reasons: (a) it still contained truth.  Marriage was still an important truth. (b) Because the people at the time were not ready to accept the hard truth of the real meaning of marriage.  “Because of the hardness of your hearts…”

The Bible is a progression to Jesus, can only be understood in Jesus, and humanity needed to build to that understanding.  Remember salvation history: Jesus came in the fullness of time: when the people of the covenant had experienced slavery, freedom, moral degradation, kingdom, civil war, fragmentation, and subjugation.  It also required the development of the Greco-Roman world for the development of the language of philosophy and a stable government for the seeds of Christianity to grow.  Christianity is not just an updated Judaism.  It required the language of Greek philosophy to fully understand Christ.  St. Augustine was a Platonist, St. Thomas Aquinas an Aristotelian. 

Why is Genesis in the genre of legend and myth?  Because the moral and religious concepts (a) would have been difficult if not impossible to convey if written into a non-fiction book form, (b) would not have been accessible to a people living in 1500 BCD, and (c) would not have been culturally integrated into a people’s heart.  [Side note: Nothing against St. Paul but if we only had the letters of St. Paul to understand Christ and no Gospels, Christianity would never have taken root in people’s hearts.]

I remember hearing a Rabbi speak on Genesis and why it was written the way it was, especially the seven days of creation.  His theme was, did you expect God to come to earth and present mathematical formulas, chemical equations, and astrophysics to the people living in the desert?  He spoke to them with what they could understand.

As to legend in Genesis, what exactly is legend?  Legend is a narrative that takes place in some distant history with some kernels of factual truths but the facts are vague.  Adam and Eve and their children populated the world?  It doesn’t match scientific history, and it doesn’t match evolution or genetic history.

So if Genesis is in the genre of legend and speaks in spiritual truths, why should I not believe in the Jesus and the Gospels as not just spiritual?  Because the Gospels are not in the genre of legend.  The Gospels are very specific as to their genre.  They tell you.  Here are a few places:

Luke 1:1-4

Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the events that have been fulfilled among us,

just as those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning and ministers of the word have handed them down to us,

I too have decided, after investigating everything accurately anew, to write it down in an orderly sequence for you, most excellent Theophilus,

so that you may realize the certainty of the teachings you have received.

John 1:6-7

A man named John was sent from God.

He came for testimony, to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him.

John 21:24

It is this disciple who testifies to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true.

1 John 1-5

What was from the beginning,

what we have heard,

what we have seen with our eyes,

what we looked upon

and touched with our hands

concerns the Word of life—

for the life was made visible;

we have seen it and testify to it

and proclaim to you the eternal life

that was with the Father and was made visible to us,

what we have seen and heard

we proclaim now to you,

so that you too may have fellowship with us;

for our fellowship is with the Father

and with his Son, Jesus Christ.

We are writing this so that our joy may be complete.

 

God is Light.

Now this is the message that we have heard from him and proclaim to you: God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.

This is not just the genre of biography.  It is the genre of eyewitness testimony.  It’s of facts, of witness, almost a testimony in a court room.  People have analyzed the Gospels as evidence gathered by detectives for a courtroom process.  You can still disagree with the validity of the testimony, but the genre speaks of witness.  If you are a Christian, you are obligated to believe it.  It is not legend or myth or even moral fable.  Witnesses went to their death refusing to disavow that Christ lived and performed these miracles.  This is very much different than anything in the Old Testament.

Faith and reason must align.  The Catholic Church insists on it.  You cannot have something true in faith but untrue to reason.  The primary reason we know that God exists is through reason.  Remember the early paragraphs of the CCC—we know God exists through the physical world in collaboration with reason.  Your whole theology would collapse if you denied reason in one case but justified it in another.  I gave the example of St. Robert Bellarmine and Galileo:

 

“I say that if there were a true demonstration that the sun is at the center of the world and the earth in the third heaven, and that the sun does not circle the earth but the earth circles the sun, then one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary, and say rather that we do not understand them than that what is demonstrated is false.”

Turn to Pope Pius XII in his encyclical, Humani Generis—how humanity was generated—addressed evolution and how to understand Genesis.  Here is a key quote:

 

This letter, in fact, clearly points out that the first eleven chapters of Genesis, although properly speaking not conforming to the historical method used by the best Greek and Latin writers or by competent authors of our time, do nevertheless pertain to history in a true sense, which however must be further studied and determined by exegetes; the same chapters, (the Letter points out), in simple and metaphorical language adapted to the mentality of a people but little cultured, both state the principal truths which are fundamental for our salvation, and also give a popular description of the origin of the human race and the chosen people. If, however, the ancient sacred writers have taken anything from popular narrations (and this may be conceded), it must never be forgotten that they did so with the help of divine inspiration, through which they were rendered immune from any error in selecting and evaluating those documents.  (paragraph 38)

This should not be leading you to a loss of faith as some have said to me.  I am fortifying your faith.  The reason we have such a growth in atheism is because of erroneous literal readings of scripture when they were not meant to be read that way in the first place. 

This is not new nor is it “modernist,” if modernism is what you suspect.  None of the great Catholic theologians Origen, Augustine, the Cappadocian Fathers, Thomas Aquinas, Robert Bellarmine read these passages in a literal way. 

They read the scriptures understanding the genre, the level of development of the people from a particular time and place, and most importantly of a people who had not witnessed the incarnation—Jesus Christ—to understand what the more important truths lay inside the narratives of the OT.

The Lighthouse: A Novel by Michael D. O’Brien, Post #3

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

You can find Post #1 here.  

Post #2 here.  

 

 

Summary

Chapters 5 & 6

Chapter 5: Save Us from Peril

A week or two after those four intruders showed up to Ethan’s island, Ethan noticed a fifth, a boat about a quarter mile south, and when Ethan espied it through his telescope he could see a man on board wrapping metal chains around himself and uncoupling the boat’s motor.  Ethan realized the man was about to drown himself with the weight of the motor.  He stripped himself down, heroically swam to the boat, pulled himself up, and physically stopped the man from continuing.  In the struggle, the man hit his head, became unconscious, and was profusely bleeding.  Ethan slowed the bleeding down, drove the boat to town, and was then able to get the man to a hospital emergency room.  Later when the man, whose name was Esau “Skillsaw” Hurly, awoke at the hospital, he and Ethan got into a confrontation on why Esau tried to kill himself.  In the dialogue we learn that Esau was the man who had burned the church down and we also learned he had been abused as a child.  Ethan developed bronchitis from having been in the cold water and could not visit Esau again for three weeks.  In the interim, Esau died. Ethan heard Hurly’s life story from Elsie who had known Hurly as a young man.

Chapter 6: The Visitor

In July, a sixth intruder came to the lighthouse, a young marine biologist who was boating along the shore and stopped at the island to talk to Ethan.  The young man was Ross Campbell, and he was a talker.  Ross was particularly interested in puffin birds.  Ethan took him to their nests, and when the talk shifted to boats Ethan showed him the boat he had refurbished but had not yet launched.  After some resistance, Ethan agreed to let Ross help him launch it.  It would be a project of several days.  Before the final moment of dropping her into the water, Ross realized that Ethan had forgotten to rig the boat with items to dock her.  Ross volunteered to take his boat into town and buy the necessary hardware.  When he came back, they installed the equipment and dropped the boat into the water and docked her.  Still there was no motor to take the boat out.  Although Ethan was paying for one, the two decided to go into town to get an inexpensive one.  After haggling with the boat equipment supplier, Ethan and Ross took back a motor and other accessories and by that afternoon had the Puffin out on the ocean.  With a boat now, Ethan was able to get back and forth to town more easily.  He brought Elsie a gift, a small model boat Ethan sculpted that matched the Elsie’s husband’s boat.  During the autumn he made a four foot replica of an eighteenth century ship and left it anonymously at the doorstep of the newly rebuilt church.

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Thoughts and observations on Chapter 5, “Save Us from Peril”

I thought the chapter with Skillsaw Hurly the best written in the book so far.  Skillsaw Hurly turns out to be the most three dimensional character in the book.  He is bitter and cynical, and has done a very evil act (setting fire to the church) but we get to learn of his hurt, or at least intuit it.  We suspect he’s been abused as a child, possibly by a priest, and so his core being is not simply evil.  There are causes to his persona, reasons for his alcohol addiction, and justifications for his bitterness and cynicism toward the Catholic Church.  In his bitterness and perhaps repulsion of his act, he has reached a level of despair, and so wants to commit suicide.  Wrapping the chains across his body to allow him to drown is almost a visual of a crucifixion.  His life has been a scourging at the pillar, and his recurring drinking bouts is an effort to find peace.  And finding peace is trying to find Christ.

I also thought the writing and especially the dialogue in this chapter was superior to anything we have read so far.  O’Brien created realism in this chapter, not clichéd characters and stock situations.  I’m going to give an extended quote here because I thought this was outstanding.  Ethan is visiting Skillsaw in the hospital trying to get him to reveal why he tried to kill himself.

They stared at each other until Ethan grew tired of it and said:

 

   “Why would you want to kill yourself?”

 

   “It was an accident,” the old man growled.

 

   “That was no accident.”

 

   “Who are you anyway? Police?”

 

   “I’m the lighthouse keeper. I found you and brought you in.”

 

   “Well, good for you. You’re a hero. Don’t you call the cops on me, ‘cause I ain’t gonna let nobody send me to the loony bin. And I need a drink.”

 

   There was nothing to say to that, so Ethan asked again:

 

   “Why did you do it?”

 

   “Ah, no reason. It was just time to check out.”

 

   Ethan continued to sit, staring at the man, wanting to go, though he couldn’t. And couldn’t say why he couldn’t.

Ethan looking at Hurley is suggestive of looking into a mirror.  Both men have had childhood trauma.  Ethan’s trauma could have manifested into alcoholism as well, but perhaps by the grace of God didn’t.  Technically Hurley is Ethan’s doppelganger, his literary double.  The dialogue continues.

 

   “You can leave now,” said Hurley. “Have a nice day.”

 

   “I’m not leaving.”

 

   “Tough guy, eh?”

 

   “I’m not leaving. And you’re going to tell me why you tried to kill yourself.”

 

   “Lots of good reasons.”

 

   “Give me one.”

 

   “None o’ your business.”

 

   “You made it my business. I had to swim out to your boat. It was a long way, and the water was cold. I untied you and stopped your bleeding. I got your motor hooked up again, and then I brought you here. That’s about half a day of my life. Probably a case of bronchitis too.”

 

   “Don’t try t’ guilt me out. It won’t work.”

 

   Ethan coughed. “Maybe pneumonia, if it takes hold. A little explanation would be appropriate.”

 

   There’s a five-dollar word. You’re a smart fellow, aren’t you?”

 

   “Not so smart. But I’m wondering why.”

 

   “Nice guy saves town drunk. Hero goes home to his happy life. Bad Boy Skillsaw goes back to the bar.”

 

   But even as he said it, Hurley averted his eyes and kept them averted. Beneath the bitterness, the mask of cynicism, there was a measureless grief.

“A measureless grief.”  Hurley is hurt, hurt inside, and can’t overcome it.  “Measureless” is like at the bottom of an ocean, the bottom of which he was going to drown himself.

 

   Ethan was not a demonstrative person, neither a toucher nor a hugger, mainly because there had never been anyone who had stayed around long enough to show him how it was done—or how to receive it. Now, tentatively, he reached out and patted Hurley on the shoulder.

 

   “Get yer hands off me!” the old man snarled.

 

   “I’m sorry.”

 

   “Nobody touches me. I been touched before. I know what it’s all about.”

 

   Tears began leaking out of one eye, then the other.

 

   Ethan had no idea what this might mean, so he waited. Time stretched painfully long, then it slowed, and Ethan felt the eternalness he sometimes experienced while gazing at the sea. A sort of peace, an inner stilling.

I found this interesting and yet puzzling.  Why would Skillsaw’s tears given Ethan the impression of eternity?  And why would it suggest “a sort of peace, an inner stilling”?  Perhaps there is something cathartic to Ethan to come across another person’s inner trauma.

 

   Hurley turned his head and met Ethan’s eyes.

 

   “Back then, I told myself I’m not a bad person,” he said.

 

   “I don’t think you’re a bad person,” mumbled Ethan.

 

   “You understand nothing. Let me finish my story.”

 

   Ethan nodded. “Please, go ahead.”

 

   “Gimme ten dollars, and I’ll tell you an appropriate story.”

 

   “I don’t have ten dollars with me.”

 

   “Ten dollars buys a good bottle o’ wine or a jug of bad rum, like home-still Newfy Screech. Ever drink screech?”

 

   Ethan shook his head.

 

   “Interesting. So now you know.”

 

   “Now I know what?”

 

   “My life ain’t worth ten dollars. Or maybe I’m saying it’s worth only ten dollars, but nobody’s got the cash to spare.”

 

   “I don’t understand, Mr. Hurley.”

 

   Hurley snorted. Hurley, is it? My, you’re respectful. Polite. A nice man you are, sure enough. You’re one o’ the good guys, not one o’ the bad guys, like me.”

 

   “Are you a bad guy? I don’t think so.”

 

   “Well, not in the beginning, maybe. It starts when you think you’re not the kind who does bad things. Then, little by little, so quiet, so slow you hardly notice it, like a lamprey hooking onto a salmon, sucking out its life without being noticed, you do small wrongs that get bigger and bigger, and more of them. First you’re standing on dry land watching the tide come in. You can hardly see it change. It looks harmless. Then before you know it your feet are wet, and soon your legs. And then you’re swimming for your life, because you told yourself that you couldn’t drown—not you—‘cause you’re the good guy.”

 

   “Mr. Hurley,” said Ethan, his voice soothing, trying to calm him, reaching out to pull the blanket up around the trembling unshaven neck. With his free hand the old man batted Ethan away.

 

   “Evil,” he croaked.

 

   “What evil?” Ethan asked.

 

   “You’re sinking and your head is full o’ darkness, but you keep saying to yourself, ‘This is right; this is good.’ But you know deep inside yourself that wrong isn’t right and right isn’t wrong, so you make yourself blinder, do more evil because evil was done to you and life owes you.”

The dialogue continues to where Hurley confesses to the arson and justifies it on the hypocrisy of the Church.  Hurley defines himself by his hurt, a rightful hurt, but when you define yourself by the hurt it is impossible to overcome it.  Does Ethan define himself by his hurt?  Has he overcome it?  We’ll have to see.

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Thoughts and observations on Chapter 6, “The Visitor" 

I don’t really have a lot to say about this chapter.  Ross Campbell is a nice young man who bonds with Ethan, and though reluctant Ethan bonds with him.  In a way, Ross is Ethan without the childhood trauma.  Their relationship demonstrates Ethan’s lack of worldly experience given that a young man half of Ethan’s age seems to know the ways of the world better.  On the other hand, Ross could be Ethan’s son, and there is a sort of fatherly relationship Ethan projects.  [Edit: I did not know at the time Ross would turn out to be Ethan’s biological son.] Ross will come back in subsequent chapters, so unlike a lot of the other characters that cross Ethan’s life, Ross is structurally part of the story. 

I will say this, I don’t find Ross that interesting a character, but we don’t know much about him yet.  Perhaps O’Brien will give us more of his backstory. 

Other than Skillsaw Hurley, the novel really lacks interesting characters to hold interest.  And I’m afraid to say that goes for Ethan as a character.  We are at the 60% mark in the novel and I cannot say I am engaged with any of the characters.  The only character that was interesting was killed off in one chapter.

Let me speculate on what a different novel might have looked like.  What if O’Brien had run the narratives of Skillsaw and Ethan in parallel with intertwining connections with some climax toward the end of a major conflict between the two.  The Skillsaw part of the narrative could have started early and we could have seen the dramatization of burning the church and Ethan trying to figure out what happened and who did it.  Call me crazy, but I think that’s a more engaging story than this.

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Ellie’s Comment:

I think the premise of this book is very good, it's just that for me, the execution lacked in many places. Like you said, Manny, there was a lack of characters that I cared for, frankly. It was a good book, just not a great one.

 

And honestly, this book was pretty predictable and full of schematic and kind of shallow characters that just did not do it. I wish some of the passages about building the boat would be replaced with getting deeper into Ethan's mind, because it feels like, even after finishing the book, that I don't know him at all.

 

I will say that I think the building and repairing of the boat stands for a sort of universal call to creating (or sub-creating, as Tolkien would say), being engaged in any creative process, trying to utilize the materials and the skills that the one Creator gave us. I found the passages about the building and repairing of the boat quite engaging, actually, but... it just lacked some spark?

 

I think Ross was meant to be... a vision of Ethan, like you said Manny. A vision of something he never was and could now never be, but something/somebody he could now appreciate.

Kerstin’s Comment:

The boat launching is rather tedious. I found myself skimming through the paragraphs. Do I really need to know every little step in the process? In second-rate novels minutia is often piled on as filler that adds nothing to the furthering of the plot. This is where the wheat and the chaff are separated, the good authors from the mediocre.

Am I going too far?

My Reply to Both:

I agree with both of you Ellie and Kerstin. Yes there is symbolism but symbolism in the absence of interesting characters or interesting drama doesn’t create reader engagement. No, you are not going too far. I felt the same.

 

I’ve read the next two chapters and will put up a summary soon, but the minutia of their work will be even more excruciating in those chapters.

My Comment:

It occurred to me after thinking about our comments on the two dimensionality of O’Brien’s characters whether it was intentional.  Before Michael O’Brien was a writer of fiction he was an artist who specialized in Byzantine icon type imagery.  Eastern Orthodox icons mandate that artistic representation be only in two dimensions.  Limiting to two dimensions, I believe, eliminates the incarnate implications and implies transcendence.  I may not understand the theology fully.  Someone help me out here if you understand the theology better than I stated.

 

Nonetheless, if Obrien is trying to capture an iconic effect in realistic fiction, he is writing in the wrong medium.  A novel in realism requires verisimilitude, that is the semblance of reality.  Once he established the ground rules of a “real” person in a “real” situation, then the character has to seem real, and yes one of the criteria of seeming real is three dimensional personality.  If he were writing of an elf in a fantasy world, then the ground rules might be different.  But Ethan is intended to be a real person in a fixed time and place with the ground rules of what the reader experiences of reality. 

 

Could O’Brien have intended Ethan and all the characters to be two dimensional?  I don’t know, but probably not.  It is a thought given O’Brien’s other artistic interests.  Since the novel does work in the medium of realism, I would assume O’Brien intended the characters to feel real. 

 

By the way, working in realism does not imply that O’Brien could not have incorporated metaphysical elements such as talking to his sculptures.  It comes across as creepy because of the execution not because it violated some aspect of fiction.

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Retrospective Thoughts Post Reading of the Novel

Skillsaw remains the most interesting character in the novel, one that O’Brien should have weaved deeper into the plot.  He is Ethan’s doppelganger and we will see that Ross too becomes Ethan’s doppelganger.  In a comment later in the novel, I will surmise that the most interesting novel out of these three characters would have been the lines of the lives of Ethan, Skillsaw, and Ross in parallel and then interweaved together.  The “Save Us From Peril” chapter was the best written, the freshest dialogue, the most interesting of all the chapters in the book.