Novel of the week Claire Allfree

THE LAMPLIGHTERS by Emma Stonex

368PP, PICADOR, £14.99 EBOOK £8.49

The sea, thinks a boatman at the beginning of Emma Stonex’s new novel – her first under her own name, after several published under a pseudonym – smells “briny, clean, like vinegar kept in the fridge”. He’s about to take a relief keeper to the Maiden, an implacable Victorian lighthouse off the Cornish coast and, since it’s 1972, still manned, just, by three men at a time. But when they arrive, no one is there. The lighthouse is locked from the inside. When they break in, it is empty of life. The only telling details are the table, laid for two, a log book describing a storm that never happened, and two clocks, both stopped at 8.45.

The real-life disappearance of three Hebridean keepers in 1900 has already inspired an opera and a 2018 film. Stonex recasts the story to produce a fanciful solution to the mystery, but her novel’s strength lies in the way it explores the existential condition of lighthouse-keeping itself. For taciturn principal keeper Arthur, the very proximity of sun, sky and sea provides cosmic consolation: he feels lonelier when on shore with his wife Helen than he does in the lighthouse. His restless assistant Bill nurses grievances against his boss, but thinks of his exhausted wife and screaming children, and fantasises about never going home. Even so, the pounding, depthless water can wreck a mind just as easily as it can a ship.

Stonex jumps between 1972 and 1992, alternating perspectives between the men in the Maiden and the wives and girlfriends on shore who, 20 years later, are forced to confront the tragedy all over again when a novelist, suspecting a cover-up, decides to write a book about what happened. Inevitably, buried secrets and trauma emerge. Relationships are revealed to be not what they seem. It’s a pity Stonex stuffs her novel with so much backstory: the plot feels over-rigged. Her writing is often lovely, though. Thanks to her, I’ll always think of sage whenever I look at the sea. And of vinegar, kept in the fridge.