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Irish Studies Network
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Colm Tóibín, Review by Jacob Urup Nielsen
The Irish author Colm Tóibín’s new novel The Blackwater
Lightship is about how the terminally ill Declan spends his last weeks
with his family and friends. The protagonist of the novel is Declan’s
sister Helen whom the story is narrated through. She has severed
the ties to her mother years ago but her brother’s illness forces her to
confront their shared past.
Helen is a successful school principal who lives a nice middle-class
life with her husband and their two boys in Dublin suburbia. She
is clearing away after a party for her husband’s Irish school when Paul,
a friend of her brother, arrives at their house. He tells her that
Declan has been hospitalised. Being gay, Declan has been diagnosed
with AIDS for several years without his family knowing. The illness
is, however, now advanced to a point where treatment for pain is the only
option. Declan’s last wish is to go down to his grandmother’s guesthouse
at Cush where he and Helen where placed for weeks when there father was
terminally ill with cancer over 20 years back. The story is in this
way a re-enactment of the past on several planes. Being at Cush entails
the bringing together of three generations of women - Dora, Lily and Helen
- who have many unresolved conflicts between them. The novel reveals
different alliances and conflicts in this threesome. The three women
are counterpointed by Declan, Paul and Larry - the three musketeers.
Yoking together opposites and creating these tensions is a Tóibínian
hallmark and is here at work at its very best. Declan becomes a catalyst
for potential reconciliation.
The Blackwater Lightship returns to a theme which Tóibín
also explored in his two first novels The South and The Heather Blazing,
namely the sense of belonging to a place. Declan finds it necessary
to return to the place where he is from - he ‘needs the creeps’ - in order
to get peace before dying. He cannot go to his mother’s house because
it is brand new and is described as having empty rooms. This symbolises
how Lily has severed herself from the past and reflects the historical
revisionist approach, which Tóibín in his other writings
has discovered leaves him dispossessed. The house is cleansed of
things connected to the past. Although Helen is at odds with her
mother and despises her for having done this, she herself likes her own
house for the same qualities - it is brand new and has not been lived in
previously. These two women are forced to confront their past at
the grandmother’s house in Cush.
The novel gets its title from a lightship that has been taken out of
service near the grandmother Dora’s house. At Cush there were once
two beacons - the Tuskar Lighthouse and the Blackwater Lightship.
As a child Lily imagined that the two were lovers and their beams were
mating calls. The story in this way is centered around the past -
the deceased father. As Lily says, she thought that her husband was
stable and would always be there, like the Tuskar Lighthouse, which is
built on solid rock, but she has discovered that it was the other way around.
Her husband was the Blackwater Lightship which was ‘taken out of service’.
The Tuskar Lighthouse works as a leitmotif and connects the past to the
present - just as Lily eventually does.
The novel’s current theme is homosexuality. Tóibín’s
poignant satire over the theme expressed through Larry: ‘You know, in my
family in my family my brothers and sisters - even the married ones - still
haven’t told that they are heterosexual. We don’t talk about sex!’
Tóibín similarly dealt with this issue in his previous novel
The Story of the Night but has now taken the theme back on Irish ground.
Tóibín’s journalistic background comes to the fore in paragraphs
like this as in his other novels which all have some element of social
critique. In The Heather Blazing the focus was on the old Fianna
Fail hegemony - represented by Judge Redmond walking the eroding cliffs
at Cush - over the new liberal Ireland of Mary Robinson.
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