The Illuminations Andrew O'Hagan 9780771068324 Books
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A compelling new novel by two-time Booker finalist and internationally acclaimed author Andrew O'Hagan. For readers of Colm Toibin, Ian McEwan, Alan Hollinghurst and David Mitchell.
How much do we keep from the people we love? Why is the truth so often buried in secrets? Can we learn from the past or must we forget it? The Illuminations, Andrew O'Hagan's fifth work of fiction, is a powerful, nuanced and deeply affecting novel about love and memory, about modern war and the complications of fact.
Standing one evening at the window of her house by the sea, Anne Quirk sees a rabbit disappearing in the snow. Nobody remembers her now, but this elderly woman was in her youth an artistic pioneer, a creator of groundbreaking documentary photographs. Her beloved grandson, Luke, now a captain in the British army is on a tour of duty in Afghanistan. When his mission goes horribly wrong, he ultimately comes face to face with questions of loyalty and moral responsibility that will continue to haunt him. Once Luke returns home to Scotland, Anne's secret story begins to emerge, along with his, and they set out for an old guest house in Blackpool where she once kept a room. There they witness the annual illuminations--the dazzling artificial lights that brighten the seaside resort town as the season turns to winter. The Illuminations is a beautiful and highly charged novel that reveals, among other things, that no matter how we look at it, there is no such thing as an ordinary life.
The Illuminations Andrew O'Hagan 9780771068324 Books
Look up Blackpool on the Internet. The largest seaside resort on the Northwest coast of England, it drew mainly working-class holidaymakers from the industrial North and Scotland, reaching its peak in the middle of the last century, when major stars would play its theaters, but it has not been able to compete with cheap fares to warmer resorts abroad. Blackpool has long been famous for its extensive illuminations that light up its promenades, piers, and miniature Eiffel Tower. The tarnished glamor of the resort in former days is an emotional point of reference in Andrew O'Hagan's latest novel, even though he does not take us to those particular illuminations until the very end. But the metaphorical associations of the title resonate throughout.Most of O'Hagan's book is divided between the Ayrshire coast of Scotland (setting of his peerless BE NEAR ME, one of whose characters makes a brief appearance here), and Afghanistan. The two principal characters are Anne Quirk, a former photographer now an elderly woman living in a retirement community, and her devoted grandson Luke Campbell, who is a Captain in the British army. I have to say it is a difficult book to follow at first. Anne is succumbing to senile dementia, and little of her conversation makes everyday sense. Though university educated and a thinker, Luke spends much of the novel with the soldiers in his armored vehicle, and the constant barrage of obscene insults in various regional dialects comes pretty close to unintelligibility. The Afghan scenes had a certain element of déjà vu for me, I think from my recent reading of THE HUMAN BODY by Paolo Giordano, but maybe it is simply that both authors took care to show it like it is.
Neither story is as simple as it seems. Anne Quirk has been a photographer in her youth, a true artist and something of a pioneer. The author implies that he was inspired by the Scottish Canadian photographer Margaret Watkins, although the biographies don't quite match. Anne's talent emerges gradually through O'Hagan's words, but seeing the pictures which were his inspiration adds an extra glow to the novel in retrospect. Most of Anne's thoughts now are centered on Blackpool, where she met her husband, Harry Blake, a war photographer and hero in his own right. It gradually becomes clear, though, that constructing stories is not merely a symptom of Anne's illness, but something she has been doing her entire life, professionally and otherwise. And when things go horribly wrong in Afghanistan, and Luke returns to Scotland, he too must shape some kind of narrative that makes sense of who he is and what he lives for.
I am somewhere between four and five stars on this one. There is much more in the book than I have described -- for example, riffs on the secrets and resentments endemic to extended families -- and at times I felt it lacked focus. But the gentle process of illumination, carefully letting the light in as a photographer does when developing a film, is one that I find quite beautiful, ultimately persuading me to round up rather than down.
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The Illuminations Andrew O'Hagan 9780771068324 Books Reviews
How dysfunctional are families?
We never really know, except with our own, and then how much do we want to admit, and how can we judge, anyway, without being able to compare?
In this brilliantly told story, the author mines deeply and uncomfortably into the mistakes and the regrets and the misunderstandings and the bitterness that dwells beneath the public barricades of a couple of families in Britain.
The central agents are an elderly woman, whose flare for photography and self-delusion have seeped into three generations, and her grandson, in whom she has imbued her thirst for understanding life beyond its ordinary ramparts.
She is settling sedately into dementia and he instinctively understands there are explanations to be found if he can piece together her life through its photographic relics and snatched fragments of memory.
They journey to Blackpool, hence the title's reference to the seaside resort's famous lights, and there he finds out why his family has malfunctioned.
But it's not totally unservicable. Just a bit fractured. His newfound understanding gives hope that like most families, it just needed some give and take, some buffing up with the facts he has discovered.
The title of this book refers to the Blackpool illuminations in a seaside resort in Northwest England, a place whose annual light show casts a rosier glow on the landscape than is actually present otherwise. The yearly spectacle, “’One million individual bulbs and strips of neon,’” the lights on the promenade are a metaphor to the illusion present in the lives of its main characters, and the artificial sunshine of their past. It’s a meditation on memory and mirage, fact and fiction.
There’s Anne, the 82-year-old woman living at a sheltered residence flat in Scotland, and suffering from dementia. Blackpool is a place of her young and robust years, one that is gradually revealed at the end of the story. At one time in the sixties, she was part of a revolutionary group of young British documentarian photographers. She remembers her past as like the Blackpool illuminations—a halo glow, especially when referring to Harry, the love of her life, a man who also taught her photography.
Anne’s grandson, Luke, a captain in the 1st Royal Western Fusiliers, has just returned from a failed mission in Afghanistan— to bring a turbine to the Kajaki dam, one that would help pump fifty-one megawatts of electrical power to the Afghan people--again the illuminations metaphor. The book highlighted Luke’s adventures with his fellow soldiers, getting high on weed, arguing about metal music, and dealing with a burnt-out, unbalanced commander. The mission went awry, and Luke alas, is suffering from disillusionment. In fact, he and his buddies believed that the virtual reality of video games was more real than desert combat.
Before joining the army, Luke was a scholarly young man who loved to read. This is a trait that he shared with his grandmother. His mother, Alice, has always had a distanced relationship with Anne. There’s enough family dysfunction to go around, and then there’s Anne’s primary helper, Maureen, a straw character, essentially, to bring out Anne’s secret past and the story of her photos.
At the start of the story, I was enchanted. O’Hagan had a knack for juxtaposing—no, almost surreally painting—a portrait of Anne’s dementia against the theme of the novel, which is the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives, the narratives we construct—sometimes artificially—to reconcile the lives we chose to live. This premise, which is lucent and brilliantly rendered from the beginning of the story, hooked me immediately. However, once the story focused on Luke’s mission, it became inauthentic. The brio, language, brotherhood, and bonhomie, as well as the rage, ribaldry, and repartee of the soldiers became as artificial as the Blackpool Illuminations. I just didn’t buy it—it felt like O’Hagan did a shallow treatment of men on a mission, and gave us a theatrical version, one that may look good on the video games he talked about, but just as unreal. In fact, I thought it troubling that the author expounded on the curse of technology today—how these soldiers felt more battleborn in video games than in actual missions, and then turned around and gave the squadron just as much fakery, especially the heavy-handed reach of working-class dialogue.
O’Hagan utilizes contrast and opposition as a working device for the story, which underscores the theme, such as, in photography “to work with contrast not only to get at life but to enhance it.” The contrast between the video games and reality, and the disparity between lucidity and dementia, are woven into the premise. He also uses photography itself as a metaphor “…he understood that new light isn’t good for old film,” meaning that the present distorts the past, and to mine the past through the lens of the present will reveal some self-deceptions.
Some of the novel worked for me, when it focused on Anne and the family story. But, as Luke’s commander too pithily said, “People who read books aren’t reading them properly if they stop with the books. You’ve got to go out eventually and test it all against reality.” The book periodically failed the reality test for me. 3.5 rounded up
Look up Blackpool on the Internet. The largest seaside resort on the Northwest coast of England, it drew mainly working-class holidaymakers from the industrial North and Scotland, reaching its peak in the middle of the last century, when major stars would play its theaters, but it has not been able to compete with cheap fares to warmer resorts abroad. Blackpool has long been famous for its extensive illuminations that light up its promenades, piers, and miniature Eiffel Tower. The tarnished glamor of the resort in former days is an emotional point of reference in Andrew O'Hagan's latest novel, even though he does not take us to those particular illuminations until the very end. But the metaphorical associations of the title resonate throughout.
Most of O'Hagan's book is divided between the Ayrshire coast of Scotland (setting of his peerless BE NEAR ME, one of whose characters makes a brief appearance here), and Afghanistan. The two principal characters are Anne Quirk, a former photographer now an elderly woman living in a retirement community, and her devoted grandson Luke Campbell, who is a Captain in the British army. I have to say it is a difficult book to follow at first. Anne is succumbing to senile dementia, and little of her conversation makes everyday sense. Though university educated and a thinker, Luke spends much of the novel with the soldiers in his armored vehicle, and the constant barrage of obscene insults in various regional dialects comes pretty close to unintelligibility. The Afghan scenes had a certain element of déjà vu for me, I think from my recent reading of THE HUMAN BODY by Paolo Giordano, but maybe it is simply that both authors took care to show it like it is.
Neither story is as simple as it seems. Anne Quirk has been a photographer in her youth, a true artist and something of a pioneer. The author implies that he was inspired by the Scottish Canadian photographer Margaret Watkins, although the biographies don't quite match. Anne's talent emerges gradually through O'Hagan's words, but seeing the pictures which were his inspiration adds an extra glow to the novel in retrospect. Most of Anne's thoughts now are centered on Blackpool, where she met her husband, Harry Blake, a war photographer and hero in his own right. It gradually becomes clear, though, that constructing stories is not merely a symptom of Anne's illness, but something she has been doing her entire life, professionally and otherwise. And when things go horribly wrong in Afghanistan, and Luke returns to Scotland, he too must shape some kind of narrative that makes sense of who he is and what he lives for.
I am somewhere between four and five stars on this one. There is much more in the book than I have described -- for example, riffs on the secrets and resentments endemic to extended families -- and at times I felt it lacked focus. But the gentle process of illumination, carefully letting the light in as a photographer does when developing a film, is one that I find quite beautiful, ultimately persuading me to round up rather than down.
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