ABOUT THE BOOK

It is Ireland in the early 1990's. Three women, Dora Devereux, her daughter Lily and her grand-daughter Helen, have arrived, after years of strife, at an uneasy peace with each other. They know that in the years ahead it will be necessary for them to keep their distance. Now, however, Declan, Helen's adored brother, is dying and the three of them come together in the grandmother's crumbling old house with two of Declan's friends. All six of them, from different generations and with different beliefs, are forced to listen to each other and come to terms with each other.

The Blackwater Lightship is a novel about morals and manners, about culture clashes and clashes of personalities, but it is also a novel full of stories, as the characters give an account of themselves, and the others listen, awe struck or deeply amused at things they have never heard before.

Written in a spare, powerful prose, The Blackwater Lightship is an astonishingly acute and moving work which offers sharp and memorable insights into the nature of love and family, and dramatises the lives of characters who appear remarkably exact and real. It is Colm Tóibín's finest achievement.

Colm Tóibín was born in Ireland, in 1955. He is the author of the novels The South, The Heather Blazing and The Story of the Night. He has also written the non-fiction books Bad Blood, Homage to Barcelona and The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe. He lives in Dublin.

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Here are some readers' thoughts on The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin:

"The novel mainly deals with fraught family relationships and how they are affected and changed when AIDS strikes the family. The main protagonists are daughter, mother and grandmother who haven't been in touch for years and are now forced to come together when the brother/son/grandson who is dying of AIDS, wishes to go back to Wexford and re-visit the place of his childhood. In a sense he forces the three women to meet again and confront the wounds of the past.

Colm Toibin is a consummate storyteller and from the beginning we are caught up in the tensions, rows and conflicting memories of the three women. Granny Devereux is a tough old lady, crotchety, independent, forthright, but yet trying to make peace between mother and daughter. The AIDS victim Declan and his two friends who come on the holiday to help out are by contrast a mutual support group looking out for each other as well as proving an eye-opener to the three women.

If you are into county characteristics the Donegal people in the book are warm, generous-hearted and welcoming while the Wexford crowd are an odd bunch. As with Colm Toibin's previous novels, this one is hard to put down. A thoroughly enjoyable read."

A member of Raheny Library Reading Group.

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"If I had not read and enjoyed previous novels by Colm Toibin I might have been put off by the opening chapter with its middle class Dublin family giving a self conscious party where few people have any connection with anyone else. Are we supposed to be impressed by the fact that an Indian family is invited? Brave new multicultural Dublin of the nineties? Even the writing seems stilted. However this is Colm Toibin so I keep on reading and am caught up as usual.

Helen is suddenly catapulted from this suburban world into a much rawer, painful one of old simmering family resentments when she learns that her brother is dying of AIDS. She and her mother and grandmother have to come together to face the past and explain past actions which have kept them apart for years. Helen is embittered by her mother's treatment of her and Declan in childhood but is not over-sensitive herself in breaking the news of Declan's illness to his mother in the middle of a business meeting. The mother is rather caricatured - this slick business woman of 90's Ireland with her modern office and bleakly modern home. In contrast, Declan and his gay friends are portrayed as loving and supportive and competent at dealing with the awful sufferings of his illness which are painfully related. They have become closer to him than his own family. There is skilful interweaving of the stories of Helen and Declan's childhood with the present and with Helen's own children.

Declan wishes to visit again his grandmother's house by the sea in Co. Wexford - familiar territory Toibin obviously feels strongly about. The sea makes Helen consider death and the futility of life. Declan wants to be in the house by the sea before he dies, but it seems to emphasise his sufferings on the one hand and make them not matter in the universal context on the other. "Imaginings and resonances and pain and small longings and prejudices...It was not just that they would fade: they hardly existed,...It might have been better, she felt, if there never had been people, if this turning of the world, and the glistening sea, and the morning breeze happened without witnesses, without anyone feeling, or remembering, or dying, or trying to love."

In spite of this gloomy conclusion we are left feeling at the end of the book that life does after all matter a lot while it is going on, and it does seem the family will come to some sort of understanding of each other as a result of Declan's illness.

A sad and thoughtful book I liked very much."

Member Raheny Library Reading Group.

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"This is a novel about the effect of two deaths in the one family; the father's death twenty years before and his son, Declan, who in the story is dying of AIDS. The story is told from the point of view of Helen, Declan's sister. Their father died when Helen was eleven and Declan was eight years old. The setting for the story is at the grandmother's house in Wexford, where, Helen, her mother, grandmother, together with Declan and his two homosexual friends stay while Declan has a reprieve from hospital care. Helen and her mother have been estranged for years. The cause of this estrangement was the death of her father, and the way she felt abandoned by her mother before and after her father's death. Her grief was totally ignored. The gathering allows, for the first time, Helen and her mother to talk about it, and acknowledge it. The experience of Declan's illness and impending death, and the love and support from Declan's two friends help heal the relationship of the three women.

The three women are well portrayed. Helen, ready to see only weakness in her mother, her conceited mother wishing her daughter were different, and the grandmother who is also damaged by her relationship with both of them who provides the comic relief in the story. Declan shines through as a courageous young man, who brings out the tenderness and love in all the characters. Larry and Paul, his friends, are heroic in their care-giving to Declan through his illness, being better informed and more able to cope than his family.

The author brings out the shadow side of a family member having Aids or being homosexual. The rushing home from Mass without talking to people, the malice of the innuendoes of two neighbouring sisters. He also brings out Helen's fear of her children feeling abandoned by her while she is there. His descriptions of the area, the sea, the cliffs, the house beside them crumbling almost contrasts with Declan's crumbling body. As the reader, you feel you would recognise it if you saw it. He writes movingly without sentimentality.

It would be impossible not to be moved by this book. It offers no lasting solutions - you know Declan's going to die, the mother and daughter relationship has improved, but it will never be perfect, but the experience will help them and you the reader understand the mother/daughter relationship a little better.

It is a page-turner and would be a deserving winner."

Reviewed by a Member of Raheny Library Readers Group.

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"The Blackwater Lightship" is the first book by Colm Toibin that I have read. It will certainly not be the last. Colm Toibin's insights into the female mind are as accurate as they are stunningly revealing. By bringing together three generations of women (of the same family) at the bedside of Declan, the dying young man whom they all love, the author unfolds their lives in a series of dramatic and meaningful snapshots. Before our eyes, their doubts and fears are resolved in such a way that by the end of the novel we are assured that they have all come to terms not only with death but also with life.

I have nothing but praise for this fine novel which merits a wide audience. The scenes between Lily, the mother and her alienated daughter, Helen, deserve special mention. The way they quarrel and snipe at each other rings all too painfully true of this kind of relationship.
Marvellous reading."

Mrs. Joan Irwin
Rosetta Road
Belfast.

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"The Blackwater Lightship is a succintly written novel that focuses on the reaction of a range of personalities to the shock of a loved one with AIDS. Foremostly, that of the protagonist Helen, a caring mother yet aloof daughter who prides herself on her familial detachment, but is forced to come to terms with her family issues in order to deal with the suffering and shock of her brother Declan's illness. Her mother Lily, who has thrust herself into the modern impersonal computer age in order to escape her loneliness and distance herself from her family, and the flamboyant grandmother Mrs. Devereaux who is 'all charm' and serves to lighten the tension, sporting a 'flick-knife' and providing the setting in a seaside house in Wexford.

These three clashing and estranged personalities are contrasted with the close-knit foundation of Declan and his two homosexual friends. They still retain their identities; Paul being the organising and focussed friend and Larry the more openly affectionate; however, they are still there to support Declan through his physical and emotional trauma, where the women split apart.

The novel explores the issues of loss, love, mother/daughter relationships, homosexuality and many more, through a series of clever motifs. Such as, the Blackwater Lightship itself - a lighthouse that has now been removed. It's constant glow in reply to the strong Tuscar Lighthouse is a symbol of female love, consistent, but has recently been removed, as shown by the three female characters. The strong Tuscar is constant and strong, as represented by the three males. However, the latter help the former to re-establish a relationship, and at the end of the novel, we are given the sense that the foundations to reconciliation between Lily and Helen have been laid down, and that the light will shine, though weakly at first, once again.

For a novel that I was required to read as part of a course for medical students to gain an insight into family politics and its relationship to health, I feel that I have gleaned not only knowledge on this subject, but many more. Thank you Mr. Toibin. I thoroughly enjoyed it....."

Richard Moodley.