The Blackwater Lightship: A Novel

A wonderful portrayal of family conflict and ultimate reconciliation because of serious illness. Toibin’s writing adds depth to the characters and is marvelous.

Beautifully written, emotionally effecting novel about an estranged family brought together by a young man dying of AIDS - a brother, son and grandson of three strong willed women. They gather at his grandmother's seaside home with two of his gay friends. What I especially liked about this novel was that it was never predictable. Just when you thought you had it all figured out the author would take you in an alternate direction. I also liked the fact that the obvious was never overstated. None of these characters is without sin. They have been judgmental and unforgiving and each has made mistakes that have been blown out of all proportion. Is there reconciliation? Is everything wrapped up neat and pretty at the end of the book? Yes and no. You feel that progress has been made. Beacuse certain things have gone either unsaid or unresolved, I feel like these characters are still alive out there struggling to understand one another and maybe forgive if not absolve one another. A very strong novel.

Five stars isn't enough but it's all I'm allowed. I read "Brooklyn" probably as a daily special November 30, 2016, and as soon as I finished ordered this one. It stayed on my tablet waiting to be read until now (February 2018.) I always have about 125 books to be read, including some I've promised to read and review that I always give preference, so it's not surprising that I've waited. I glanced at the reviews and was astounded that virtually all hadn't given it 5 stars.This is an outstanding look at the tortured relationships that exist in many families, and at the pain of being gay and dying of AIDS in the earlier years. In this family AIDS brings the family back together, forcing grown daughter, mother and grandmother to individually look at the trauma of earlier deaths and their impact. Late in the story, Helen (grown daughter) is with Lily (mother) and suddenly realizes that as a child her feeling was that Lily left with Dad and came home without him and was never again even the same Mammy. Helen went to her Dad's funeral and overheard mentions of cancer before he died but feelings aren't always rational.Helen's younger brother Declan is near death from AIDS and their mother and grandmother don't know he's gay. When he leaves the hospital he wants to be taken to their grandmother's home, the home where he and Lily were "abandoned" for long months as their father lost his battle with cancer. They arrived unannounced and two of Declan's gay friends arrive almost immediately to care for him.Without ever providing a date, this is clearly in the early years of AIDS when a diagnosis was a death sentence. I had a blood transfusion not long before AIDS arrived and was routinely tested for years. My brother was diagnosed with AIDS at a time when he could have contracted the virus before it was even known. Before he died in 1997 tremendous advances had been made, and he lived relatively healthy for many years, but AIDS still meant lingering illness before inevitable death. Like Declan, he kept the family at a distance once symptoms became a disability and relied on gay friends for support, only reconnecting weeks before his death.I mention the personal connection as sort of a disclaimer. Nevertheless, the book is masterfully written. The characters gradually arrive at a new understanding of their old divisive traumas and arrive at a place where a future is possible. It had been 10 years since Helen made the decision not to invite or even notify Lily of her marriage. Lily has never met her son-in-law or her grandsons, so the uncomfortable permission for them to meet them is a major step. Toibin did not make the mistake of making the reconnection quick, comfortable or guarantee sustainability.This will surely become a classic.

Thoughtful well written novel about a complicated mother daughter relationship.

Colm Tóibín never writes an easy story to read & there always seems to be some small element that reaches in & speaks directly to me.Helen is a mom & a wife & a teacher, seems to have a loving marriage. Her husband & 2 sons head out for the start of a vacation & Helen is looking forward to some alone time....a visitor arrives & things change. We see a week or so in the lives of Helen, her mom, her grandmother, her brother & a few other people. In that week we actually get a little glimpse of a lifetime with Helen.An estranged relationship between mother & daughter & the needs of a son & brother hopefully help get this family to somehow maybe have a chance to get together again.Colm's female character's seem to have similar ways about them in the few books of his I have read, rather cold & remote & removed on the outside but carrying a lot of love & hurt inside....very interested to know what his childhood & relationship with his mom was.I am still gathering my thoughts on this one....tough read.

Only my second Toíbín work, The Blackwater Lightship draws the six primary and disparate characters together in a convincing story of a biological family and chosen family joining together to see a young man out of this world. No spoiler alert is needed, this is the late 1980s or early 1990s before pharmaceutical cocktails changed HIV-AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable disease with a normal life span. The writing is beautiful and the time structure – present back to childhood is poignant and without confusion. Despite the sad end, there is much beauty that comes of characters immediately or eventually doing the right thing. Toíbín’s description of houses, geography, light, even the smell of places are beautifully wrought.

Very good reading. The story flows well, the characters are real and their interactions all make sense. The storyline touched my heart, in fact, it seemed much like my own experience with my Irish mother and her family. Helen's relationship with her mother and the passing of her father at his early age were nearly identical to my life's experience as a child and even mirrored my adult relationship with my own mother. Their life answered a few of my questions regarding relationships.

I could relate to the place because my sister used to live in Blackwater, Co. Wexford; the characters seemed real, and the narrative developed nicely; the plot was handled tactfully and realistica.ly. Light reading

I liked the way the story is told.

Colm Toibin just gets it.He writes in a fashion that just gets to the point and connects has a knack of making me think ....”Yes! I wish I. Like put it like that”The relationship between the three Ladies from different generations, Grandmother, Mother and Daughter is tense and really well observed and developed.This was a joy to read as it really nailed the everyday life observations and feel of the towns and countryside settings in Ireland.Loved it. My favourite Colm Toibin book (to date)

This insightful Booker Prize-listed novel from 1999 gets to the heart of family dynamics via the direct route, by slicing open the flesh and cracking open the ribcage. Death is at the family's door, but emotionally it has haunted them all for years, souring their relationships, estranging them and casting a long shadow over every action and every thought. Bypassing melodrama and theatricality, it dissects the dysfunction plaguing the family, treating the symptoms without necessarily offering a cure. Wounds still fester on the final page, with more to be inflicted on the characters beyond it, so anyone seeking closure may feel mistreated. Its surgical approach will not be to everyone's taste either, but it is never sterile, and is delivered with an easy bedside manner. Recommended.

Declan va mourir du Sida et il bat le rappel de ses amis et de sa famille, une famille déchirée au demeurant: trois générations de femmes qui n'ont guère tenté de se comprendre et préfèrent garder leurs distances plutôt que de mettre à plat leurs conflits et leurs ressentiments.La mère et la soeur de Declan sont tenues à contre coeur de rejoindre la maison de la grand-mère où le jeune homme souhaite vivre ses derniers jours, une vieille bâtisse appelée à disparaître dans les flots et qui concentre toutes les animosités.Très belle écriture et fine analyse psychologique des personnages en ces instants où la mort rôde et que le temps est compté pour parvenir à un peu de sérénité: très beau roman qui n'épargne pas le lecteur sur les méfaits de la maladie sur le malade lui-même et sur ceux qui l'entourent.

Helen has had a strained relationship with her mother Lily and grandmother Dora for years. But now Helen's brother Declan is dying of AIDS, and the three women are forced to come together for his sake. At Declan's request, they all go together to spend some time at Dora's home, resurrecting unhappy memories of the time Helen and Declan lived there as children, while Lily was in Dublin looking after their dying father.Tóibín's writing throughout is spare and beautifully controlled, always giving the impression of simplicity and integrity. He paints a very convincing picture of the small village of Blackwater, old-fashioned and conservative, also slowly dying as erosion from the sea gradually destroys the houses built on the coast. There's no real plot; this is a study of the three generations of women, forced together physically by a shared grief but emotionally separate. And there's a secondary strand as Declan's illness allows Tóibín to look at attitudes towards homosexuality in Ireland in the `90s, through the reactions of the three generations of his family to his two friends who have come to stay with him. The book is told in the third person from Helen's viewpoint and what we get to know about the other characters comes through that filter, and through the many conversations that take place as the long days and wakeful nights pass. As old resentments come to the surface, Tóibín takes no sides and apportions no blame, nor does he offer any easy resolutions."Imaginings and resonances and pain and small longings and prejudices. They meant nothing against the resolute hardness of the sea...It might have been better, she felt, if there had never been people, if this turning of the world, and the glistening sea, and the morning breeze happened without witnesses, without anyone feeling, or remembering, or dying, or trying to love."I've been reading Tóibín backwards in time, my first introduction to him having been the gut-wrenching and amazingly powerful The Testament of Mary (which I'm delighted to see on the Booker longlist). In this book, I can clearly see the potential that he fulfilled in the later one, but I found this book curiously cold. Although we learn a little about Declan's friends, Declan himself remains underdeveloped - he's really little more than a catalyst to bring the women together. The contrast of the emotional openness and competence of Declan's friends with the frosty reserve and inadequacy of the women was, I felt, over-stated and a little too simplistic to be truly convincing.The characterisation of the women is much deeper and their conversations and interactions ring entirely true. However, as we slowly learn what is at the root of the tensions amongst them, the reasons don't seem to sufficiently explain Helen's bitterness, and as a result she comes over as a rather selfish and unforgiving person, still focussed on her own childhood resentments and having learned very little from her own experiences of love and motherhood. And this, I think, is the reason that the book didn't have quite the same emotional impact in the end as either Testament of Mary or to a lesser degree Brooklyn.Overall, though, the themes of grief and family, the sense of place and time and the intimacy of the characterisation are all hallmarks of Tóibín's work which, combined with the quality of the writing, make this an insightful and compelling read; and, despite my reservations around the emotional depth of the book, one that I would highly recommend.