The Blackwater Lightship

From Barnes & Noble

The Ties That Bind

Irish writer Colm Tóibín's spare, insightful novels have won him a wide readership both at home and abroad. Although his novels address gay themes -- his The Story of the Night is on the Lambda list of the 100 best gay novels of all time -- his work neatly transcends such genre pigeonholing. Short-listed for last year's Booker Prize, Tóibín's latest novel is The Blackwater Lightship. On the surface, it is the story of a man dying of AIDS who makes the decision to reveal his homosexuality and his disease to his family and to seek their help. But what makes it such a powerful piece of fiction is the way that the theme of homosexuality -- and, specifically, the ravages of AIDS -- serves as a metaphor for a pernicious condition that was destroying the man's family well before his own troubles become known to them.

In the opening pages of the novel, we meet the protagonist, Helen, who appears to be happily married with two small sons. For a brief period, we witness the calm routines of her life: tending to her children's nightmares, throwing a dinner party with her husband, taking care of her duties as a schoolteacher and administrator. But it isn't long before she receives a visit from a mysterious man named Paul, who is there to tell her that her brother Declan is dying of AIDS. The rest of this book is an intense and unrelenting survey of Helen's journey into the world of her brother's sickness, as she accompanies him to their grandmother's house on a hill over the sea.

Once Helen and Declan, along with their mother, arrive and settle in, it becomes clear that the emergency of Declan's disease is bringing together a family that has been torn apart by mistrust and resentment. Helen bitterly hates both her mother and her grandmother, and we learn that she didn't even invite them to her wedding or inform them of the birth of her children. At every turn, each character seems to have a web of reasons to resent the others; there is little hope that they will ever be untangled. At a few junctures, as Helen nears reconciliation with her mother, she simply shudders and hurries along to her next task in the sick room.

The theme of unhappy families is, of course, well covered in literature -- and recent years have offered quite a few books about AIDS and its impact on the lives of its victims and their loved ones. But the ease with which Tóibín makes the surface story of a misunderstood man dying of a misunderstood disease stand in for the surrounding family breakdown is nothing short of virtuosic. We soon come to see that Helen, her mother, and her mother in turn are cold, distant women. And, in offering a cast of basically unsympathetic lead characters, Tóibín shows us, through flashbacks and painfully direct and telling interactions, how these distances might have come to be created. It becomes impossible to condemn any one woman: Each has been so marked by loss that it would be heartless to hold her accountable for her actions.

In his exact and efficient prose, Tóibín is reminiscent of Jane Austen and Henry James for his ability to reveal, with sometimes brutal directness, the inevitable patterns of human interaction and the misery they can engender. His technique at times is so simple as to be nearly invisible: He often, for example, describes one character watching other characters interact from a distance that is great enough that she cannot hear what they are saying, but close enough that she can get an impression of what sort of exchange it is. In this way, we experience the pain of Helen's family in a cumulative fashion that mimics the actual reality of such a scenario. By the novel's end, a brief word or two can speak volumes about the explosive memories and resentments lurking just below the surface.

The Blackwater Lightship is one of those rare novels that exist on two completely different levels. While some readers will be drawn to its moving portrait of Declan's coming to terms with his fatal illness; others will appreciate its illumination -- in brief but constant flashes, like the lighthouse of its title -- of Helen and Declan's complex and tortured family ties. But it is the connection between these themes that gives the novel its power: The metaphor Tóibín develops between a physical disease that cannot be stopped and a psychological one that is just as ruthless is a rare literary accomplishment, confirming the great promise of his earlier work.

—Jake Kreilkamp

From the Publisher

Francine Prose Elle Beautifully crafted...spare and devastating...

The Wall Street Journal The Blackwater Lightship is the most perfect work on the Booker list...The prose is economical and deft, and the book is rich with entrancing stories.

Jim Marks The Washington Post Book World ...supple, beautifully modulated prose, complex relationships and careful construction...a powerful and absorbing novel.

Mark Levin Men's Journal Tóibín is a superb technician with a brave soul. The Blackwater Lightship is a great and humanizing novel.

Robert Sullivan Vogue Tóibín writes with high-voltage restraint.

Judy Lightfoot The Seattle Times So much is here and you long to grasp it whole...the best new novel this reviewer has read all year.

Barnes & Noble Guide to New Fiction

Short-listed for the Booker Prize, acclaimed Irish writer Toibin's latest details the store of three generations in an estranged family reuniting to mourn a tragic, untimely death.

Library Journal

When Helen O Doherty was 11, her father died of cancer, attended by her mother in Dublin while she and younger brother, Declan, were locked away from the truth in their grandparents house on the Wexford coast. Now in her thirties, the successful school principal and mother of two is still in emotional limbo, and her bitterness toward the adults who made a trap of her innocence lingers. She must, however, confront the past if she is to understand another ever-present tragedy: Declan, who has not officially come out to his family, is dying of AIDS. The rhythm of conversation and argument carries TUibIn s spare novel after The Story of the Night, LJ 5/15/97, which was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize for fiction. Sometimes his thankfully unobtrusive nature unsettled this reviewer; he refuses to heal Helen s wounds completely by book s end and lets her forgive at her own grudgingly human pace. Moreover, TUibIn s lack of ego is admirable, and he creates a realistic portrait of adults acting like children and children acting like adults. Recommended for fans of contemporary Irish fiction. Heather McCormack, Library Journal Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

The New Yorker

Toibin is a sparing, unsentimental writer; he has an innate sense of the formal feeling that follows great pain. His portrait of three generations struggling to accept (and care for) one another is deftly offset by the medical and social formalities of dying from AIDS, and the novel's achievement lies in its depiction of the everyday enterprise of loss.

Elizabeth Flynn

Readers have come to expect as much from Toibin, but The Blackwater Lightship goes beyond his earlier work in its depth and compassion. The novel delivers a graceful and moving meditation on loss, obligation, and the nature of family. In an era of ever-more-rapid change, Toibin's radiant novel reminds us that some things are more constant: love and frailty, and our human need for one another.
—Lambda Book Report

Emily Drabinski

Toibin's prose is almost musical in its soft and persistent exploration of what makes a family: secrets, resentments, and, ultimately forgiveness.
—Out Magazine

John Freeman

Without ever being heavy-handed, Toibin shows how death can shed light on the morals of individuals as well as entire families. He also illustrates the paralysis that strikes people who have an overwhelming need for approval and love: They are stopped in their tracks in the same way that they might be frozen in the sweeping ray of a lighthouse beam.
—Time Out New York

Mark Levine

Toibin writes like a stylistic heir of Hemingway, in spare and brutally insistent prose, and inhabits a domain of silence and inarticulate hurt with utter conviction. His book is a microscopically drawn map of the way families inflict pain on themselves. There's not a cheap revelation or a fake insight to be found in its pages; Toibin's absolute lack of sentimentality and his refusal of easy consolation are the marks of a superb technician with a brave soul. The Blackwater Lightship is a great and humanizing novel
— Men's Journal