Trying to find What is the essence of The Lighthouse by Alison Moore

 Trying to find What is the essence of The Lighthouse by Alison Moore

10 out of 10

 

 

If we start with the end of The Lighthouse – which might mean that there is a spoiler alert right here…but wait, maybe I am not about to reveal any secrets just yet, so why don’t you just stay tuned, for now, unless of course, you consider the merits of what I am about to put down here and then be warned, there is not much to keep you here – then I am reminded on the exquisite, magnetic, bravo bravissimo The Dressmaker by Beryl Bainbridge http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-dressmaker-by-beryl-bainbridge-10.html , where something dramatic, final, coming after an incredible crescendo happens on the last page and though details are scarce, readers cannot be sure as to what happens to Futh – or are you…if you have not read it, maybe you let me know when you will have finished it – but it is ominous and if we have paid attention – concentration is a condition sine qua non for happiness, Flow http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/10/flow-by-mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-this-is.html - we have seen what Bernard will do to some stranger he finds in his wife’s bedroom…or bathroom for that matter…

 

'She became a tall Lighthouse sending out kindly beams which some took for welcome instead of warnings against the rocks ' Muriel Spark…this is written before the first lines of the ‘Stunning’ Lighthouse, the Ultimate Perfect Novel on many levels, one of which will be that it is quite short, at 192 pages, and it thus allows the public to absorb so much in such a short time – and therefore be able to hope for other Magnum opera, on about the same level as this or at least close to it…which is what the under signed is lately concerned with…I mean, yes, it would be great to finally take the time and finish The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, a classic that is the quintessential sine qua non, but at more than one thousand pages, it will take the time to travel to maybe seven Lighthouses and thus it will be delayed indefinitely

'Futh stands on the ferry deck...' these are the first words into the chef d’oeuvre and we find later that the hero is just separated, has no children, 'he keeps stick insects and wanted a dog... Angela had said no to the dog…So he got stick insects', works in the manufacture of synthetic smells ...we replicate chemical compounds which make apples smell like apples, mimicking natural smells' and could be conceived as too bizarre, remote from the ‘regular’ man, especially the ‘hero type’, or perhaps we should think superhero – which is what audiences, the public is looking for these days, right…they go in droves to watch the Avengers, Superman, Batman movies and not Mank, the best film of  2020 for this cinephile http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/02/personal-best-motion-picture-of-2020.html

 

The main character is so peculiar, outré, as to seem to be one we cannot identify with, but I surely do – which maybe says all that is necessary about the talent of Alison Moore, in that she is absolutely glorious in her creation, or that the under signed is really becoming an alien, like Futh, hopefully without sharing his fate, or it could be both – seeing that in his forties, he has just separated from his wife – that is not strange, it is more or less the norm – and he takes the ferry to travel to Germany and then walk for about one hundred miles, over the period of one week, in which he will move in a sort of circle, doing at east fifteen miles daily and well, he keeps ‘stick insects’…besides, he is not allowed a pet in the apartment he has to move to, once he takes his boxes from Angela, his wife, so he has to leave the insects with her…

 

When he meets Carl on the ferry, a stranger who had lost his hat in the wind on the boat and then they started a dialogue, and the protagonist accepts the invitation to have coffee at Carl’s mother’s house in Utrecht, which is on the way to the walking tour, I thought maybe the hero is gay – something that is still possible, in the sense that maybe he is bisexual, or pansexual, one of these polyphonic choices of these days, that could include all orientations, maybe excluding some at different times – Futh is an outlier, he has learned how to drive in his forties, is unable to fix anything – oops, this is what happens to yours truly, who is unable to do anything practical, maybe too lenient, procrastinating to have been interested to learn, practice or anything – and pays someone else to change a bulb for the lights of the car…he has bought a second hand car, then had a flat and never took care to get the changed one ready for another emergency and therefore he will be stuck in Germany…

Gradually, as the hero remembers, we get familiar with aspects from his past, the fact that one day his mother just took off and left him and his father – the latter will prove to have the peculiar DNA transmitted to his son, taking all the things of his departed wife, boots, clothes, even the furniture that he took apart and putting them on a huge fire – they lived near Gloria and her son, Kenny – the boy being a sort of friend to Futh, though this became more of an adversarial relationship…eventually, it is almost clear that Angela, the now separating spouse, has had an affair with Kenny, who becomes a second hand car salesman, though our main character will not buy his vehicle from him, even when prompted by Angela

 

The promiscuity of the adolescence will surely have contributed to the indecision, the character of Futh, given that Gloria is frequently inviting him to her house, if genuinely innocent in the beginning, this rapprochement becomes sexual – at one time, she is taking a bath and she pushes him to enter the bathroom and rub her back, insisting that Kenny used to do that for her – and once, when the boy had been invited to have a drink and he is in the kitchen, his father comes to Gloria’s house and it is evident that he is not there as a neighbor, but the two of them have an intimate affair – Futh remembers also how his father brought to their room a different woman every night and then they went to the bathroom, where the son could see them in the mirror…

The other main personage of the story is Ester, nearing forty now, who had wanted to be a perfumer, but is now in charge of a small hotel, with ten rooms, managed with her husband, Bernard, named Hellhaus – which does not mean a Hell House, as I thought, because of the ‘false friend’, but it is something like a bright, perhaps Light House…the theme of the lighthouse is pervasive in the book – where Futh will stay on the first and last night of his tour – and hence their paths will intersect, tragically for one of them…now that we are near the end of the note, the number of those still here is close to zero, so let us rock and party with the secrets – we learn quite a few things from the past of the woman, how she first dated and got engaged to Conrad, Bernard’s brother, the latter taking some sort of vengeance against his sibling for the past, Bernard and Ester are now locked in a rather dangerous, at times violent bond and when Futh stumbles into the frame, Hellhaus may indeed become…A House from Hell, not The Lighthouse that sends messages with light or fog horn