Review: The Illuminations, by Andrew O’Hagan: a healing light

The Illuminations

Author: Andrew O’Hagan

ISBN-13: 978-0571273645

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Guideline Price: £12.99

In the quiet of a Scottish seaside town Anne Quirk, living in sheltered housing for the aged, communes with a china rabbit ornament and talks about the way the light falls. Her neighbour Maureen, seeing that Anne is drifting into dementia, tries to cover up for her.

Maureen has always found loving to be hard work and has difficult relations with her ex and her children, but she finds it easy to love the fey and enigmatic Anne. This new friend next door has a past that involves New York and men and art – and, above all, she doesn’t judge Maureen.

The only man in Anne’s life now is her grandson Luke, an army captain stationed in Afghanistan. Maureen has become Anne’s interpreter; she reads her Luke’s letters and writes him letters back. Anne could be said to be like a photograph, “fading away and becoming known at the same time, and Maureen was there to see it happen”.

This is a rather neat implication, as we soon learn that Anne was once a successful photographer, impassioned and artistic and committed to capturing the essential in life and, above all, the light. (She is based on a real photographer, the Scottish-Canadian Margaret Watkins.)

In the intensity of the Afghan heat and hectic military activity, Luke thinks often of his grandmother. They have always enjoyed an instinctive understanding, and since his childhood she has been his supporter and mentor. Taking him around the galleries, giving him books, Anne gave Luke the world “not as it is but how it might be”. Here in Helmand he needs her more than ever – the person who “once revealed to him a world beyond the obvious”.

Such people of significance in others' lives, the people who make you better than you might otherwise be, are important presences in The Illuminations. Anne herself found that person in her husband – though was he really her husband? – and her fellow photographer Harry Blake. It's on Harry's memory and the things he told her about light and photography that she dwells now in her state of what comes across as almost bliss.

Losing his nerve

Luke found another inspiring person in Maj Scullion, the leader of his platoon. But too much war is getting to the major. He’s losing it: his nerve, his conviction, his judgment. Luke and Scullion are army types of a classic kind, familiar in literature; bookish, given to quoting poetry and willing to discuss what the hell they’re doing here and what it’s all about. But Luke still has youth on his side, while Scullion, at 47, is old and weary and disillusioned.

Andrew O’Hagan’s writing can be oddly flat and clunky at times and sublime at others. These sections in Helmand display updated war writing at its best. The liquefying heat, the hills like “brown blankets”, the brief chaos of attacking and being attacked, and the inertia of inaction that follows. The “men” are young soldiers, often no older than 18, who see battle like playing a video console and go back to their Xboxes after writing their last letters home, “just in case”.

Their macho language is vividly scatological and inventive and wonderfully convincing, the camaraderie based on a lingo of traded insults; when they’re nice to each other is when an officer starts to worry.

That many of the fellows in this platoon should be southern Irish may be surprising. There’s Dooley from Cork and McKenna from Louth, and the major is ex-Trinity and from Mullingar. But this is apparently true to life in the Royal Irish Regiment, which the author used for research.

And you might quibble that, wherever they’re from, they all speak the same lingo, so you can’t tell them apart – but this equally expresses the tribal culture of the army, to which a soldier is obviously obliged to conform if he wants to survive, personally and in the field.

The men are longing for action, “for a story to tell”. For something “they would hate the moment it arrived . . . ” When it does come it’s unplanned, a mistake, an error of judgment on the part of the major. It involves betrayal and a horrific shoot-up in a village during a wedding party, the kind of shoot-up that wrecks careers and can make it impossible for a soldier to live with himself. It finishes Luke as a soldier, so he gets out and comes home.

He is fragile but not broken. Anne is liable to confuse him with her beloved Harry, but he’s able to recognise in his grandmother his continuing purpose, even salvation. When he discerns that the lights of Blackpool are hugely significant for her, and that the city contains the key to the mystery of her earlier life, he takes her there.

Here the mystery is revealed: her fidelity to an old life and an old love, which involved betrayal and tragedy but which to her was greater than the sum of its parts and which is still, in a real sense, intact. In a state of mild ecstasy and great tenderness, she and Luke watch the Blackpool illuminations as they are switched on, to cover the city “like a beautiful endless halo”.

Transcending horrors

This is a thoughtful novel that, deriving its light from insights, transcends the horrors it describes. The insights are about life and its obstinacy despite everything, the light immanent in life. About war and about peace, about art, about love that can spring in unlikely places. About the world of men versus the world of women. And, not least, about dementia, which here is presented not as the grim and dreadful finality we fear but as as a chosen living dream.

Anne Haverty’s works include novels, poetry and biography