‘When he wakes sometimes from dark dreams of broken cradles, and compasses without bearings, he pushes the unease down, lets the daylight contradict it. And isolation lulls him with the music of the lie.’
M.L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans is a novel that captures the very sea air of the ruthless Australian coast within its pages, and sweeps your breath away with its vivid detail. Set in the dual backgrounds of a small town post-World War One and a remote lighthouse out to sea, we meet Tom, an ex-soldier, and Isabel, the woman who revives him. Two lost souls suffering from war’s bloody aftermath, Isabel and Tom are drawn together by a chance encounter on the beach, and bound to each other in a lie as untenable as seawater…
Posted as the keeper of a lighthouse on Janus island, it’s not long before Tom gives into his isolation and marries Isabel. The pair try to start a family on this unforgiving yet forgotten corner of the world to little avail. Miscarriage after miscarriages strains their marriage to breaking-point till one fateful April morning a rowing boat washes up on their doorstep, carrying a dead man with a wailing baby girl in his arms.
Therein begins the crux of the narrative, therein unfurls the moral dilemma the reader must grapple with as much as the characters. Much to the unease of Tom, the couple raise the infant as their own child, perpetuating a lie of devastating consequence to the mother who searches for her back on the mainland. Stedman addresses the boundaries of human attachment and presents the love between a parent and a child powerful enough to triumph over the conscience.
Is it right to raise a child which is not your own if there is even a shred of doubt of whether or not her family may be alive? Is it a sin to love a baby as much as if she had been cleaved from your own flesh?
That the novel’s characters have stayed with me half a year after having completed it is a testament to breadth of empathy through which Stedman depicts her characters, evoking compassion not only for Tom and Isabel, but simultaneously for the mother searching for child. Moreover, the scene in which Tom first scales the lighthouse to be confronted with the infinite vastness of the world around him is exceptionally immersive.
However, the narrative structure is often broken up by flashbacks which slows the pace of the novel quite significantly at times. It is not a novel that is action-orientated but relies on understanding its characters. On a final note, it becomes a little disturbing to see how far Isabel relinquishes her own identity for the baby, losing all sense of purpose other than that of being a mother. Her obsession with motherhood might convey the attitudes of a small 20th-century town towards the role of women in society, but her actions in her grief are extreme (particularly towards the end) and quite possibly unforgivable.
Verdict: 4.5/5
-Florence Y. Bauhofer
Advertisements Share this:
