The Illuminations

January 26, 2015
This empathetic novel from OâHagan (Our Fathers) revolves around a fictional, largely unknown photographer named Anne Quirk, and Luke, her grandson, who serves in the British Army. Anne suffers from dementia and lives in a retirement community. Luke is serving in Afghanistan, where he listens to death metal, gets stoned, and watches the war tear apart his mentor, Major Scullion. In her youth, Anne was a sharp woman, with a keen eye for beauty in the commonplace. Luke often reminisces on the moments they had together, and the ways she encouraged him to look closely at the world around him. When Luke was 12, she took him to Dunure Harbour, where âthey stood holding hands on the jetty, the wind pushing them back as they took great gulps of air. âBreathe, Luke!â she said. âYou canât argue with that! Fresh wind off the sea. Oh my. I wish I could catch it with the camera.âââ As Anneâs memory deteriorates, Luke seeks out details about her life and discovers a life marked by tragedy and self-deceit. OâHagan sympathetically dissects how falsehoods burrow into daily life; his story provides a deeply felt urge to look more closely at the world and those we love.

Starred review from January 1, 2015
The Scottish author's fifth novel (The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of his friend Marilyn Monroe, 2010, etc.) is a lean yet rich family story built of small and crucial moments in memories and reality across three generations. Anne, at 82, has come to a kind of assisted living facility on Scotland's west coast, and her memory has begun drifting. Often she returns to a time in the 1950s when she was a talented photographer and had a child with another shutterbug. When her grandson, Luke, a British army captain fighting in the Afghanistan campaign of recent years, enters the narrative, it shifts from homey prose snapshots to harsh newsreel realism. The contrast recalls a long article by O'Hagan, also a well-regarded essayist, that looks at deaths in the Iraqi campaign and those affected at home; titled "Brothers," it's among the collected nonfiction in The Atlantic Ocean (2013). Anne and Luke have always been close, and he returns after a nightmarish ambush in Afghanistan to help her in the transition to a nursing home. In the process, he discovers long-concealed secrets and sadness tied to another coastal town, Blackpool, which is famous for the annual lighting ceremony that gives the book the literal stratum of its many-layered title. Family pain comes in many forms, including the exclusion Luke's mother feels from the special tie he has with Anne, the very mixed feelings of Anne's ever helpful neighbor toward her own brood when they visit the facility-even Luke's father-brother relations with his fellow soldiers. The story is ripe for sentimentality, but there's a journalistic cast to the spare prose and tight dialogue that helps O'Hagan almost always avoid it. It's remarkable how much human territory O'Hagan explores and illuminates with a restrained style that also helps drive the novel along at a good clip.

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October 1, 2014

The elegant and incisive O'Hagan, a multi-award winner named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2003, tells a story about storytelling and how it must sometimes be blown out of the water. Distinguished documentary photographer Anne Quirk has survived loving a devious man by creating her own ongoing deceptions. But then grandson Luke, a captain in the Royal Western Fusiliers, returns home to Scotland after finding his perceptions of the world wiped clean by the war in Afghanistan. Luke and Anne join forces to investigate a mystery in Anne's past blinking among the Blackpool Illuminations--the glowy artificial lights that bedeck their seaside resort town in darkest winter. Love this author!

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