The sea will turn on you if you’re not paying attention; it changes its mind in the snap of a finger and it doesn’t care who you are.’ I found clingy home-maker Jenny the least likeable character (with Bill a close second) and I was really routing for jail-bird Vince until I found out he killed a dog, which I suspect says more about my own prejudices and unbalanced thinking than the story itself! I cared about Arthur and Helen and all that they had been through. The ending of The Lamplighters has been the subject of much discussion and debate since the book’s release. Readers have been fascinated by the mysterious disappearance of the three lighthouse keepers and have been eager to understand what really happened to them. I was completely engaged with this which is a deep character driven drama of many layers. A bit Russian doll like, unraveling a layer at a time, slowly you come to an understanding of sorts, it leaves you melancholy and thoughtful.

Flannan Isles Vanishing: the power of an enduring mystery The Flannan Isles Vanishing: the power of an enduring mystery

This book appealed to me because I LOVE atmospheric stories, and a bit of Supernatural. The mystery of what might have occurred was intriguing. This structure allow us get to know each character directly. Each monologue displays their biases and insecurities. Their accounts often conflict. Jenny tells us she and Bill have a happy marriage – so why does he spend so much time at sea? Bill thinks that Vince, the youngest member of the team, is crude and shallow – but Arthur tells us Vince writes poetry and Vince’s girlfriend Michelle still thinks of him as her only love 20 years on. And why do Helen and Arthur so seem so estranged when they appear to love each other? Each chapter reveals a little more and offers up another mystery. It feels like the lapping of an outgoing tide, coming forward to leave a new clue, retreating to show more of the beach. Emma Stonex has delivered a real puzzle box of a story with The Lamplighters . She tantalizes us with allusions to greater reveals, subtly peppering the many narratives with hints and clues, drawing out each thread until it’s taut enough to snap. The answer to the central mystery—what happened to the lighthouse keepers?—is revealed only when the secrets of each man’s life finally intersect. The resolution of the mystery was a little drawn out but when it arrived it provided a satisfactory explanation, although I felt a sense of injustice for Arthur. Maybe if I was married to Jenny I would have also have been driven to creative options for escape although potentially less drastic! I like the idea of that shell being returned to the sea. All that travelling over millions of years, all that effort, rolling in the grind of the prehistoric wash, only to be spat up on a distant shore…’

🍪 Privacy & Transparency

The book emphasizes the importance of the three lighthouse keepers' personalities, their ability to get along or at least tolerate their differences. It is a lonely, solitary life spending long periods of time away from wives and girlfriends. The longing for their loved ones on land must be endured, or for some, their isolation may come as a relief. Secrets and deceptions emerge that leads to anger, resentment, and even madness with a supernatural element.

The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex - Book Reviews | Inspire The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex - Book Reviews | Inspire

The impossibility of knowing a person fully is also a theme. Do I know what this man or woman I love is truly capable of? Is there a darker side? Perhaps even tending toward violence? Does solitude exacerbate untoward symptoms of dysfunction? Will loneliness and the absence of communication send grief spiraling toward a violent destination? These are all questions that Stones explores, probing the behavior of people who don’t understand their frailties, their absolute limits. The first half of the book dragged quite a bit. We got to know the three lighthouse keepers but we also got to know wives and girlfriends who were left behind after the disappearance.If a student of taste wants to know the thoughts and feelings of the majority who lived during Franklin Pierce's administration [1853–57], he will find more positive value in Maria Cummins' The Lamplighter or T.S. Arthur's Ten Nights in a Bar-Room than he will in Thoreau's Walden [the former being far more popular] – all books published in 1854.... Usually the book that is popular pleases the reader because it is shaped by the same forces that mold his non-reading hours, so that its dispositions and convictions, its language and subject, re-create the sense of the present, to die away as soon as that present becomes the past. [3] Twenty years later a best selling author wants to solve the mystery. He talks to the women left behind and we hear from the men themselves. All hold different parts of the story, things the know, that need to be put together. We also, and I enjoyed this, learn about how the men lived, worked, the setup of their living spaces. Towards the end, the novel presents us with different possible solutions to the mystery, including the one which, it seems, we should take at face value since it is recounted by an omniscient, third-person narrator. Even then, however, an element of doubt remains: “We’re not sure of the truth, are we? Isn’t that the point? Some mysteries just aren’t meant to be known…”

The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex | Waterstones

A mystery is only a mystery for as long as it remains unsolved. The set-up can carry as many intriguing details as you like, but at the whiff of an answer, it loses its power. My challenge with The Lamplighters was to tread the fine line between committing to what I think happened to the keepers, and leaving enough avenues open for readers to decide on their version of events. While The Lamplighters is in many ways a book about the endurance of the human spirit, it is also about this need in us to find resolution, to reach the truth, and ultimately to throw light on dark places. The wives who should’ve have bonded together over this incident are estranged and only one is talking.Anyone who grew up in Scotland in the 70s and early 80s can tell you about the lighthouse keepers of the remote Flannan Isles in the Outer Hebrides in the early 20th century. The story of the three men who settled down to eat only to seemingly vanish into thin air haunted my childhood – and it would appear that of Emma Stonex too. The author’s first novel under her own name transports the location to the close-knit but still remote Cornish coast and updates the action, plausibly, to 1972 – an era when mobile phones don’t exist – before flashing forward to 1992 when an investigative journalist believes he has uncovered the truth but needs the men’s very different widows and girlfriends to prove it. Kupinse, William (Fall 1999). "Household Trash: Domesticity and National Identity in The Lamplighter and the 'Nausicaa' Episode of Ulysses" (PDF). The South Carolina Review. 32 (1): 81–87. And while much of the novel is inspired by history—particularly the Flannan Isles Disappearance of 1900—Stonex has also included just enough otherworldly strangeness to give The Lamplighters an eerie campfire air:

The Lamplighter - Wikipedia The Lamplighter - Wikipedia

There is one part that felt needlessly added and didn’t fit with the character of Vince, although Vince had his problems I can’t believe he made a little girl watch as he set fire to her dogs kennel, killing the poor dog and obviously traumatising the girl. This seemed needlessly gratuitous and out of character.With all the elements of a gothic novel, this compelling and haunting narrative -with its complex, enigmatic characters, was inspired by the actual event in 1900 of the disappearance of three lighthouse keepers on the remote Flannan Isles. ‘The Lamplighters’ is adeptly partitioned with the disappearance of the keepers occurring in 1972, and an investigative reporter’s attempt to unearth the truth beginning in 1992; with the narration floating between the potent characters, and the action emanating from parallel time frames, the plot could quite easily have become fractured. Remarkably, Stonex remains in command of each critical, entangled thread as she seduces readers into her intricate web of intrigue and suspense; not once does she tolerate complacency as the labyrinths of loss, deception and intense psychological trauma are explored. As the book unfolds, we see the friendship between the three men grow and deepen, as they work together to keep the lighthouse running and support each other through their personal struggles. What happened to those three men, out on the tower? The heavy sea whispers their names. The tide shifts beneath the swell, drowning ghosts. Can their secrets ever be recovered from the waves?