Jillwilson's Reviews > The Illuminations

“The bobbing about of supportive or colliding groups, and the individual's life within them, has been O'Hagan's long preoccupation.” (https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/...) I was inspired to read this book after reading ‘Mayflies’ which to some extent focuses on the ways in which individuals support or collide in relationship, especially when the going gets tough. I really liked that book.

This novel runs two main storylines. Luke Campbell is a 30ish army captain leading a squad of Royal Western Fusiliers in Afghanistan. His story alternates with that of his beloved grandmother, Anne Quirk, a woman stricken with growing dementia who is living in the Scottish town of Saltcoats. Luke comes from a military family. His father was a British soldier killed in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and he enlisted as a way of connecting to a man he barely knew. Anne was once an avant garde photographer but gave this up many years ago. Apparently her character (in terms of art) is modelled on Canadian photographer Margaret Watkins who Watkins was apparently an acclaimed photographers in North America around the turn of the 20th Century, but she gave it all up, moving to Glasgow in 1928 and never returning home. “Watkins came to Glasgow in 1928 to visit her aunts, intending to stay for a year, but remained until her death 41 years later. Her work as a photographer was unknown in Scotland and not long before her death she gave a box to her neighbour, Mr Mulholland, on the condition he did not open it until after she died. It contained more than 1,000 photographs, many with exhibition labels, and among them were some of her New York kitchen.”
(https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-...
https://www.all-about-photo.com/photo...)

Luke has returned from Afghanistan after a catastrophic deployment in which one of his young soldiers died.” He is bitter, explaining to his mother:
There’s no nation, Mum. There’s only people surfing the Net … It’s a game, Mum. A great game. We only believed in it for as long as it lasted. I love my country for its hills and its inventions, not for its sense of injury, not for its sentimental dream that there’s nobody like us.
“The Great Game” usually describes British and Russian 19th-century imperialist manoeuvres in Afghanistan and elsewhere – here, Luke uses the term ironically: nationalism, in his view, is a delusion.” (https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2...)

I’ve been reading this thinking about the recently publicised alleges atrocities of Australian SAS soldiers in Afghanistan. I’ve been thinking both about what a stupid, terrible war that’s been and how the process of becoming a soldier must almost inevitably involve some brutalisation or numbing to the things that happen. In the case of Luke and his fellow soldiers, they are en route protecting the journey of a piece of hardware when a stop in a village goes badly wrong. I don’t want to spoil the tension by saying more – he creates the scene really well. O’Hagan is said to have spent a lot of time with soldiers who have seen “action”; he “relies on imagination, empathy and members of the Royal Irish Regiment who, according to his publishers, “have been answering his questions since he began The Illuminations.” The military insights (“The time to start worrying on a mission is when the boys are being too nice to one another”) and dialogue, which fizzes with derangement and tenderness, shows he listens closely.” (https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...)

In one interview, it was stated: “O'Hagan has been a Unicef Ambassador for 15 years. He went to Afghanistan in 2013. "I had come with no agenda, but could quickly see that I'd arrived in a country caught in the middle of some insane politics, and the war was something we not only appeared to be losing, but that we didn't understand."” (https://www.smh.com.au/national/scott...) Apparently he wrote an essay in 2013 for the London Review of Books about children in Afghanistan; an earlier piece of 2008 described the experiences of British soldiers in Iraq. “The actual battle for the Kajaki dam, which took place in February 2007, and US air strikes on villages where weddings were taking place and civilians were killed, inform the novel’s war scenes.” (https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...)

I thought he wrote very effectively about war and about the youth of its main participants. “For the new generation of soldiers, O For the new generation of soldiers, O’Hagan writes in one of the novel’s persistent themes, actual warfare seems less real than the combat video games they grew up playing: “Younger soldiers often thought they knew the battleground; they saw graphics, screens, solid cover and . . . guns you could swap. . . . They saw cheats and levels . . . and the kinds of marksmen who jump up after they’re dead.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...)

Luke spends time with his grandmother when he returns to Britain and the novel moves into a space where they travel together to Blackpool to the annual festival of Illuminations. Blackpool is where Anne kept a room in a guesthouse for a long period of time. Blackpool is illuminating (sorry – it is a bit of an obvious metaphor) in terms of Anne’s history and family. One reviewer called out the folus on light: “Lights are burning everywhere in the dark world of Andrew O’Hagan’s impressive new novel: snowflakes pouring from a street lamp “like sparks from a bonfire”; a single tiny lightbulb shining in a doll’s house; the “constellation of death” that is the light show of rocket-fire in a hillside war at night; light falling on ordinary objects in a kitchen sink to make an artwork; the “illuminations” bursting into life in Blackpool. “Colour is light on fire,” says a woman to her grandson, a woman who has spent her life “looking at objects and the way the light ... changed them”. And then there’s the light of truth, the book’s underlying theme: erratic, patchy, often unwelcome, and hard to get at – because “life had been rearranged, and always is”.” (https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...)

I liked this book but felt that the weight and awfulness of the events in Afghanistan kind of dominated Anne’s story and the last section felt a bit hasty and too easy. The two narratives felt unbalanced. Having said that, I really enjoyed reading it and will seek out more of his books.