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The two characters at the heart of “The Illuminations,” Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel, demonstrate the truth that the deepest, most tender family relations sometimes skip a generation.
In this case, the bond connects a partially senile octogenarian and her soldier grandson. Never mind the muddled present, where Anne Quirk drifts in and out of lucidity. In the past, she served not only as mentor to Luke Campbell but as something like a mother.
That Anne was never quite mother to her daughter, Alice, Luke’s mother, invites not so much irony, in O’Hagan’s wise telling, as compassion. This British author is a master of making readers care about all of his characters. Their very flaws draw us into their inner complexity. No reader dares to cast a stone.
In a seaside Scottish town, Anne spends her confused days in public housing for the elderly. While alone, she forgets to turn off the stove and mumbles nonsense to her ceramic rabbit. When kindly neighbor Maureen drops by, she may ramble on about “her photographs” and “her Harry.”
Meantime, Capt. Campbell is leading a squadron of British soldiers through the heat and boredom and menace of Afghanistan. A university graduate, he’s been an officer for nearly a decade, in part out of loyalty to his father, a soldier killed amid the Troubles of Northern Ireland when Luke was a boy.
As for Maureen, she’s a mother who complains when her grown children don’t call and complains just as much when they visit. She’s comfortable with everyday happiness only when she’s assisting the old neighbor lady worse off than herself. The author makes Maureen’s oscillations a telling variation on Anne and Luke’s domestic complications.
O’Hagan airlifts his narrative from Scotland to Afghanistan and back, bringing to each setting his sharp-eyed intelligence and gift for dialogue. O’Hagan’s soldiers verbally joust with scurrilous abandon, while Anne hunts and pecks for words just beyond her reach. All are desperate to keep chaos at bay. Seeing clearly can save your life, at least temporarily.
Anne: “It was a familiar process for her, looking at objects and the way light picked them out and changed them.” Luke, on his commanding officer, Major Scullion, once his guru, now an enemy: “When Luke examined his face, he saw the eyes of a little counter-assassin from Westmeath [in Ireland]. They were fogged with humanitarianism and strict orders, but they were still the eyes of a man who knew what to do in a dark alleyway.”
Scullion is drawn in such vivid primary colors that he threatens to hijack the narrative, while Alice remains a bit too obscure. Nonetheless, Anne and her grandson dominate the story’s emotional heart, as we try to puzzle out their mysteries.
Memory eludes Anne as much as it fascinates Luke. He remembers the granny who would take him to art museums and read books to him: “Anne had given him the world not as it was but as it might be.” But who is the Harry she keeps invoking? And why is she obsessed with the resort city Blackpool? And where are the photographs that hint at thwarted artistic aspirations?
O’Hagan summons with equal precision soldierly cynicism and domestic strife. He subtly juxtaposes the slaughter of innocents with Alice’s insistence that Anne’s refusal to tell more about her father amounted to bullying. Thus, parenting, dementia and warfare become battlegrounds of the defeated and wounded.
Luke returns from Afghanistan a disillusioned man, but the curiosity Anne instilled will guide him toward the resolution he seeks. Thus he escorts his granny on a pilgrimage to Blackpool, at the time of its famous Illuminations, a festival of lights and fireworks.
O’Hagan keeps his own fireworks relatively low key. “The Illuminations” is deftly orchestrated and quietly moving. It satisfies in much the same way that his previous fine novel, “Be Near Me,” did. Anne, like Father Anderton, a closeted gay Catholic priest in that novel, is “one of the people who can’t have the life they want.”
On the strength of these fine novels, Andrew O’Hagan ought to be better known here. He’s easily as accomplished as some of his higherprofile British peers.