The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman

The Light Between Oceans

by M.L. Stedman

Scribner, 2012

ISBN: 978-1476708492

345 p.p.

Sometimes I pick books the way I pick wine: by title and label art. I originally chose The Light Between Oceans because of the soothing blue cover and the fact that the title intrigues: what is the light and how does it get between oceans? Which oceans? A quick peruse of the back of the book told me that a lighthouse keeper and his wife find a dead body and a baby wash up on shore and end up keeping the baby. Doubly intriguing. I then come to find that Michael Fassbender was cast in the lead role for an upcoming adaptation? Sold. So sold.

Happily, Stedman’s novel did not disappoint. The Light Between Oceans was a splendid take on modern fiction: it expertly blends crime, magical realism, post-war themes, and Australian regionalism. We are set in post-WWI Australia and follow a soldier who is haunted by his own bravery in the war. Stedman’s treatment of Tom is brilliantly subtle: he’s naturally a quiet man and, as war hero characters are prone to saying, he must have had a “good” war experience. As a polite man, Tom does not argue with people, but once in a while you see the stress fractures on his soul. Tom quietly breaks as life, instead of giving him more pain and terror, gives him love and family and a sense of self. He’s a man who can’t handle the fact that he survived the horror of the war and came home to success. He feels his joys are undeserved and he wants to find a sense of universal justice but finds that the world simply doesn’t work that way. He has killed people in the war, yet he survives. He has widowed wives, yet he finds the love of his life and gets married. Tom simply can’t believe that he’s allowed to be happy. It isn’t until his wife, Isabel, is settled with him that the story transitions and encompasses not only Tom’s sense of justice but also Isabel’s sense of “justice.”

Tom and Isabel are on Janus Island, an isolated small island surrounded by dangerous rocks that could wreck ships, and thus houses an important lighthouse. Tom relishes the desolation of the island—he likes that it includes only him and Isabel (and their few livestock animals) with constant requirement to fix up the place. He is able to make sense of himself and the world through his hands—through work—but Isabel challenges his sense of balance. She was anxious for romance; she liked the seclusion of Janus insofar as it allowed for a darkly romantic getaway with her new husband. She wants to be surrounded by children and create her own paradise—become the Eve of Janus Island. After two miscarriages and a stillbirth, suffice to say Isabel’s shimmering paradise is cracked around the edges and she begins to become unraveled and unhinged. When a baby appears next to a dead body such a short time after her own stillbirth, Isabel believes that the baby is destined to be hers, and Tom believes taking another baby away from her might just irreversibly crack Isabel’s damaged psyche.

Baby Lucy is really the focal point of the book: her childhood, Tom and Isabel's role as parents, and their mixed feelings about it. Isabel uses Janus’ seclusion to escape the fact that she has taken someone’s baby and not reported it; she is a firm escapist. Tom, on the other hand, is haunted by the fact that just taking the baby was wrong. Stedman creates a positively thrilling journey through her characters' lives, delicately displaying the cracks in the portrait of a happy family and following them to the awful reveal: that baby Lucy is actually the missing baby “Grace” from the mainland and her real mother desperately misses her.

This book discusses how fragile “right and wrong” really are—and it reminds us of how silenced women who have miscarried are often forced to be. Miscarriage and stillbirth is traumatic—women are rarely encouraged to seek help for the emotional scars of losing their children and Isabel is a perfect representation of this oppressive silence. How can we blame her for what she has done when she can never deal with her overwhelming grief in a healthy way? Stedman has a masterstroke in this novel and I’m thrilled to see the upcoming film adaptation. For a freshman novel this truly shows Stedman’s talent and I can’t wait to see more.

***

M. L. Stedman is a native of Western Australia currently living in London. As she is intensely private, it’s difficult to find many biographical details about her, but some probing reveals that “M” stands for Margot. She was a lawyer in the 90s until she found a love for creative writing later in life. The Light Between Oceans is her debut novel.