This is a chilling yet satisfying read. One thread of it is a crime thriller, another is about a father’s love for his departed son: this is intertwined with a thread about the resentment another man has about his own upbringing by an ailing and abusive father. Still another is about a writer trying to write the books his father would have liked. (Oh, how I know!) The author has been praised for the way that she shows things from the perspective of the women in the story, but she’s actually doing pretty well with the men and must actually have known some, which isn’t always apparent with every much-lauded female author.
About a lighthouse crew, their wives and girlfriends (John le Carre fans will have momentarily thought something different if they saw the title without the cover illustration), this novel has not only been well-researched, but well understood. The author knows what all her facts mean, and this, again, is not accomplished by all authors.
And for all the author’s story-telling skill and her care for emotional narratives, this is a story about a life-saving device and a triumph of engineering, which also quietly destroys the men who make it work.
“The Lamplighters” is published by Pan Macmillan/Picador on the 4th of March 2021
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