From here on the book abounds with the idea of miracles and God’s divine benevolence – Isabel and Tom, along with their community, are God-fearing folk – and the novel’s imagery reflects a world of choices bounded by Christian sensibility. Then, miraculously, a small boat is washed ashore with a dead man and a baby, a young girl, who is very much alive. Yet life does not follow Isabel’s dreams, and after three miscarriages she questions herself as a woman. She embraces the prospect of a lonely life with a lighthouse keeper. When she meets Tom, she either falls in love or makes a pragmatic decision – able-bodied young men are thin on the ground in the small town of Partageuse – and proposes marriage to him. Isabel’s family has been hit hard by the war. Tom, a decorated war hero, returns from the Great War haunted by all that he has seen and done, often wondering why he survived physically unscathed when the horror of war is evident all about him, in the broken bodies of the men who returned as well as the lingering grief of families whose sons remained in Europe. This is where Tom Sherbourne and his wife Isabel spend several lonely years, coping with the grief of three miscarriages. On a literal level the ‘light’ referred to is the lighthouse on the fictional Janus Island off the coast of Western Australia, situated between the Indian and Great Southern Ocean. The title of the book, multifaceted in meaning, is a clue to this. The Light Between Oceans is a tale of personal tragedy and moral ambiguity.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |