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rfmcdonaldColm Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship begins quietly enough with a party and its aftermath, thrown in the pleasant suburban Irish home of Helen O'Doherty. Life is good for her, with her promising career in education, her husband and her sons, and her well-constructed if circumscribed life. It's only the next day, when a friend of her brother Declan drives up and tells her that Declan is desperately ill with AIDS, that she's forced to deal with the mother and the grandmother she has been trying to distance herself from for years. The various characters thus all trapped in the frame of Declan's decline, The Blackwater Lightship uses them to explore the question of what it is to constitute a family, even in the face of all of the differences--of sexual identity and memory and gender roles--that so complicate families.
I couldn't help but note certain haunting similarities between the civilization described by Tóibín and the civilization that I experienced growing up, the place names and family names and social structures and cultural norms and families that exist(ed). I can't guarantee that these similarities didn't influence my reading of The Blackwater Lightship unduly, although I am willing to say that I found Tóibín's sparse prose to be remarkably evocative in describing the pain of Helen and Declan's family as they try to fumble towards some sort of tolerable conclusion to their various miseries. Any novel with characters so hurried by their painful lives is bound to be a sad novel, but it's to Tóibín's credit that he makes it a good one.
I couldn't help but note certain haunting similarities between the civilization described by Tóibín and the civilization that I experienced growing up, the place names and family names and social structures and cultural norms and families that exist(ed). I can't guarantee that these similarities didn't influence my reading of The Blackwater Lightship unduly, although I am willing to say that I found Tóibín's sparse prose to be remarkably evocative in describing the pain of Helen and Declan's family as they try to fumble towards some sort of tolerable conclusion to their various miseries. Any novel with characters so hurried by their painful lives is bound to be a sad novel, but it's to Tóibín's credit that he makes it a good one.
