By Bron Sibree for the Sunday Times
The Illuminations
Andrew O’Hagan (Faber & Faber)
*****
It’s true that Andrew O’Hagan spent time in Afghanistan with British soldiers in order to write his remarkable fifth novel, The Illuminations. But he was determined to shine a light not just on the battlefront of a war he describes as “Britain’s Vietnam”, but also on the home front. “People forget that in war soldiers don’t just exist for the battle, they come from women, and they’ll go back to women, and that’s what community is about,” says O’Hagan. “What a woman would say standing beside her kettle in a small town in the west coast of Scotland is as important to me as what a general in Helmand province would say the second before the guns open up on the enemy.”
O’Hagan has always striven for – and delivered – “an elegance of truth” in his astoundingly original fiction. But he’s hit a grace note in The Illuminations. Five years in the writing, it’s a beguiling double narrative about 82-year-old Anne Quirk, a former pioneer of documentary photography now struggling with memory loss, and her adored grandson, Captain Luke Campbell. Taking its title from the Blackpool Illuminations, an annual event where neon lights illuminate six miles of coastline for 66 days every year, the novel plies its way between war and peace, photography and light, memory and secrets on the road to sheeting home the notion that no life is ordinary.
O’Hagan was inspired by the real-life story of Canadian photographer Margaret Watkins, who was once credited with pushing the limits of modern photography, but drifted from the public eye after relocating to Glasgow in 1928 to look after her elderly aunts. She died in obscurity in 1969. “That aspect of Margaret Watkins’ life felt so personal to me in that the women I grew up with had had that experience, of being drawn always back into domestic expectations and their imaginations being slightly snuffed out at that point, says O’Hagan. “She was a fantastic artist, and I’d hoped that one of the things the novel might do was alert people to the neglected genius of this woman.”
He also describes her scribbled observations about those with a “strange gleam of vision, something worth striving for, something a bit beyond the end of their small human noses” as “the rationale for the whole novel”. For O’Hagan, who grew up in a house where the only book was the telephone directory and worked assiduously to transform himself into ballet dancer before he succumbed to the lure of the written word, all his books, be they fiction or non-fiction, have come “from the basic rubric that there is no such thing as an ordinary life”. He also shares with his fictional protagonists Anne Quirk and her grandson a profound belief in the potency of “ways of seeing”, in the power of a kind of artistic ordering. “We don’t just live life,” says O’Hagan, “we alter life by the living of it and in the way we see it.”
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Book details
- The Illuminations by Andrew O’Hagen
EAN: 9780571273652
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