January is over and I am home from my hot holiday in Mexico. I can say I feel a little bit successful in completing at least one book while I was on vacation, despite taking three with me. Maybe that just means my vacation was really good and not boring? Still, I would like to be a little more ahead in my Reading Challenge like I set out to do at the beginning of the month.
The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman is a steady flow of emotions; guilt, love, loss and grief all circling the tragic story of an isolated lighthouse keeper and his wife. I haven't read a book that made me cry as much as this one did in a really long time. It ripped my heart out on more than one occasion. Beautifully written for sure.
Set just after the First World War, the story starts with Tom Sherbourne returning home to Australia. Looking forward to the isolation that an off shore lighthouse posting provides, Tom struggles with his dark memories of the war and his deep-felt guilt that he should not have arrived home alive when others did not. His new wife, Isabel, lets him feel again when he never thought he would, but his army training and adherence to the rules causes a rift when they find a dead man in a dinghy and a living baby girl on the shores of their island.
The author's description of the tolls that the war took on the town of Point Partageuse, from where Isabel hails, and Janus Island is just off shore from, is chillingly intimate and exquisitely written. (Pages 16-20 in my copy or the first part of Chapter 2) I read the sequence of pages a few times just to take in each detail and it really helped me to understand the guilt that riddles Tom's soul about the war.
Heart-wrenching, but also incredibly hopeful and loving, the ups and down in The Light Between Oceans are an emotional ride that had me looking for tissues. Between the loss of the unborn children that Tom and Isabel endure, the grief that follows each time, and then the eventual hope and love that arrives with the baby girl that washes ashore. The mesmerizing story M. L. Stedman weaves is felt in every word, page, character and intricacy of the tale. The loss, grief, love and guilt is felt by all, even those on the mainland far outside the isolation that is Janus Island. Their own losses, grief and hopes of the future are interwoven in one way or another with Tom and Isabel's plight, some very intimately and others in a greater sense.
One particular passage stuck with me, and even appears in the movie as part of a conversation Isabel has with Tom:
“Coming back last time to the house she grew up in, Isabel had been reminded of the darkness that had descended with her brothers' deaths, how loss had leaked all over her mother's life like a stain. As a fourteen-year-old, Isabel had searched the dictionary. She knew that if a wife lost a husband, there was a whole new word to describe who she was: she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a parent lost a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or daughter. That seemed odd. As to her own status, she wondered whether she was still technically a sister, now that her adored brothers had died.” (pg 123)
This detail of Isabel's inner story gives a possible over-arching insight to the way many characters in the novel could be feeling about how the war has effected each of them, everyone they know and everything else in between. In particular, this memory helps Isabel come to grips with everything that has happened to her and her own attempts at motherhood and the decisions that she and Tom make about the baby girl and the dead man that arrive in the boat.
The Light Between Oceans main theme reminds me of a quote from, surprisingly enough, Jurassic Park III (2001). Said by Dr. Alan Grant, played by Sam Neill: "Some of the worst things imaginable have been done with the best intentions." The whole premise of this novel rides on the idea of 'best intentions'.
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Made in 2016 and starring Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander and Rachel Weisz, The Light Between Oceans film was just as much an emotional roller-coaster as the novel. I think having read the book and knowing all the more intimate details and thoughts of the characters and their back stories made watching the movie a lot harder and more emotional for me. I knew when every heartbreak and emotional turmoil was coming. I was a blubbering mess on the couch the whole time.
Also, because I really like all the main actors too, I think it really made the film that much more real for me. The scenery, music, and sometimes lack-there-of, sprinkled with the sparse dialogue and long shots of just Tom and Isabel out on Janus with nothing but the sound of the wind made the movie for me. However, this also made it more despairing, and some what lacking but also desperate in clinging to the internal struggles of the characters and trying to make the audience sense it, feel it, breathe it through them.
There were obviously things left out of the movie, but I felt most of them didn't effect the main plot or theme set out by the book and carried over onto the screen. Overall, I really liked the movie. I LOVED the book and highly recommend it.
I really think I need to not read a weepy one next. In fact, The Chrysalids by John Wyndham is next.
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