No Man Is an Island

The Lighthouse: A Novel. Michael D. O’Brien.  Ignatius Press, 2020.

Crafting a human soul is a slow and painstaking process, like sculpting a richly detailed and vibrant figure from the mute solidity of wood or stone.  In The Lighthouse Michael D. O’Brien illuminates the sculpting of a human soul through the smoothing effects of solitude and the incisive chiseling of its interruptions.

One of the questions that will occur to the reader is why O’Brien chose to call it The Lighthouse rather than The Lighthouse Keeper, since it is the life story of a man who, through overhearing a conversation in a cafe, becomes a temporary assistant and then permanent sole custodian of a lighthouse on a minuscule island a mile off the eastern coast of Nova Scotia.  Ethan McQuarry (whose very name conjures up stone cutting) is only eighteen when he takes up what he does not yet know will be his life’s work, but tending a lighthouse is exactly the work that he needs for his recovery from “the shipwreck his life had been from the moment he was born.”  Abandoned by his father even before his birth and negligently raised by an alcoholic mother who in turn abandoned him when he was a teenager, he left school after tenth grade to find work to support himself, and after two years of logging found steady and more solitary employment at the lighthouse.  As someone who has, not surprisingly, acquired a distrust of human beings, Ethan enters upon a life of welcome and healing solitude interrupted at first only by the twice-yearly delivery of supplies and the occasional castaways whom he rescues and briefly shelters.  For the most part he is alone, and yet not alone.

Michael D. O’Brien is a Roman Catholic Canadian novelist and artist whose fiction has evolved from usually lengthy and explicitly Catholic novels to, in this book and his previous novel The Fool of New York City, shorter and implicitly Catholic stories.  Unlike the protagonists of earlier novels Ethan is not a Catholic or even religious and says at one point that he does not know if he believes in God.  There is, in fact, only one character who is clearly a Catholic, Elsie, the keeper of a bed-and-breakfast in the nearby town of Brendan’s Harbour, who befriends Ethan, and he enters a church only once, near the end of the story.  However, the epigraph of the book from Psalm 107, “They that go down to the sea in ships, trading upon the waters, they see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep,” provides the context for Ethan’s life.  Although he does not trade upon the waters he certainly encounters the Lord’s providential wonders in the long years of silence and solitude that he needs to realize who he is and prepare for what he is meant to do.

In his early years at the lighthouse he learns “without words, almost without thinking, that the passage of time was simultaneously swift and eternal.”  His experiences of nature in the form of flavors, sounds, fragrances, and standing on a cliff in the midst of a storm awaken his senses.  An autodidact, he devotes much of his spare time to prolific reading of novels, Shakespeare, Latin, practical engineering, and, no doubt, numerous other subjects, discovering that tranquility has improved his memory, while also mastering all the equipment and technical skills necessary to operate the lighthouse.  But above all, in the depths of his solitude, he becomes intensely aware of a presence, a “listening,” in the world.  “There were times when he was overwhelmed by a quietude so profound that all noises ceased, and then he sensed the overarching awakeness of existence.”

Life for Ethan is contemplative and almost monastic in its silence and solitude, but although he has separated himself from his former life among human beings he is not completely isolated because every low tide reveals a sandbar that enables foot travel to Brendan’s Harbour, some five miles down the coast, a trip he does eventually begin to make to visit the post office, bank, and library, and to buy supplies.  Taciturn like most recluses, Ethan is for a long time known to the residents of Brendan’s Harbour only as the man who tends the light and saves people.  So his life proceeds for several years until the fateful day he finds washed up on his island a battered twenty-two-foot lifeboat that he decides to repair and refurbish, a project to which he will devote ten years, in the process discovering depths in himself he had not suspected.

Not only does he learn how to repair the boat, which he names “The Puffin” after the seabirds which he loves to watch when they nest on his island, but through much trial and error he develops his latent talent as an artist, specifically a woodcarver.  His first carving is of a puffin for the bow, but having produced puffin verisimilitude he feels impelled to continue his wood carving with a series of human figures—his “family”—with each work of art expressing another part of his soul while preparing him for the series of visitors and other events that slowly and carefully awaken his need for dialogue with human beings and reveal the significance of his life.

So why did O’Brien choose the title The Lighthouse?  Near the midpoint of the story one of Ethan’s visitors remarks that “everyone dreams of being a lighthouse keeper at one time or other.”  Although this is certainly not literally true, and Ethan himself disagrees, it is nonetheless the case that human nature craves a certain amount of solitude and communion with nature and the “presence” that transcends it, as well as the significance of a life devoted to saving the lives of others.  Ethan himself had not dreamt of being a lighthouse keeper before he unexpectedly found himself in such employment, but he did realize early on that his “deepest passion” was in fact for the lighthouse and all that it represented, and not only for the quietude which is not, of course, an end in itself.  His vocation was to serve and transmit the salvific light that, as he tells the same visitor, would, if looked at directly from within the tower, cause permanent blindness.  The work of the light benefits only those out on the deep.

Decades ago O’Brien mastered the art of storytelling, and even though there is no imminent apocalypse or need to hide from Nazis or other totalitarian political authorities, this novel is entirely absorbing in its own quiet way, filled not only with the pleasure of knowing Ethan in his psychological, spiritual, and artistic  awakening but also with countless details regarding tools, equipment, the numerous challenges and their solutions involved in the labor of launching a heavy boat, and even the diet of a lighthouse keeper.  O’Brien is far more a Christian Aristotelian than a Platonist, a man who encounters the incarnate God in all the enormous diversity, material solidity, and smallest details of creation, as well as in the mysterious workings of Divine Providence.  The busy world of getting and spending might think that a life lived in obscurity and solitude is of little or no consequence, but O’Brien has a very different view.

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