(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
Ostensibly the magically real world of The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World by J. R. Dawson is about a man and his daughter Nera who play a vital role in shepherding the souls of the dead, those immediately passed and those who lingered for a time with the living of Chicago, to the Veil for what it is presumed is their eternal rest, reward or whatever it is happens there.
No one is entirely sure since those still alive cannot enter it (or are not supposed to be able to, anyway) and so Father and Nera take them on a ferry side across Lake Michigan from the Station as it’s called to the edge of the Veil, each soul accompanied by a companion dog.
It is these dogs that ensure the souls both reach the Station in the first place and then have their fears or anxieties allayed by a friendly canine presence, a role they have performed since well before there was a Station, a place with magical pianos, cinemas that play your favourite films and bars that serve your favourite food, exactly as you remember it.
And while The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World is about all these things, it is also very much about what happens to Nera when she discovers, in the midst of a failing Station which seems to be unable to vanquish the ghostly Haunts who hunt the souls as effectively as it once did, that her life, the one she is supposed to live before she too dies, may not as truthfully circumscribed as she thought it was.
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It’s this coming out story, which happens just as the only home she has ever known since Father rescued her as a baby from the shores of Lake Michigan appears to be failing, its light dimming and it fire fading to nothing, that forms the enveloping and lyrical luminous heart of a novel that is as starkly emotionally honest as it is heartwarmingly beautiful and hopeful.
While The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World may nestle right alongside the business of the dead and their voyage to the Afterlife, it more about the living and what happens to them when grief overwhelms them to such an extent they forget hope to properly live.
We all have seen people do that, and may have succumbed, briefly or for far longer ourselves, and Dawson empathetically represents what it is like when grief is never fully resolved, when the pain and loss of the past builds what turns out to be a present with a fiercely limited timespan, and how you cannot build a future on the foundation of broken, tear-soaked humanity.
Not that Father will admit to such a thing, and it’s not until a living person named Charlie, herself wrapped in grief beyond imagining at the sudden loss of her sister, somehow gets onboard the ferry to the Veil, following a song very unique to her, and well and truly upsets the unnaturally natural order of things, that long-unresolved grief might finally have a chance to run its normal course.
What marks The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World as something special is that Dawson goes deep into the nature of grief and how it can corrode and diminish us if we don’t deal with it.
While the Station is a wondrously good thing in many ways, giving souls a sanctuary from a harsh uncaring world and ensuring they are able to safely reach the afterlife, it is, it turns out, borne of Father’s (he does have a name but it relates to a very personal backstory so its discovery is best left to reading the novel) unresolved grief and is somewhat sullied as a result.
Nera is essentially trapped in a physical manifestation of her father’s grief, and as this emerges, it becomes clear that for her to truly live her life, something she’s only doing in very restrictive shadows at the moment, she needs him to deal with painful things he has long repressed.
But she also needs to be brave enough to embrace and relate to a living world that has always been presented as a battleground between life and death, and between good and evil.
Charlie challenges her in the very best of ways to re-evaluate who she is and how she sees the world, and as they grow beautifully and possibly romantically closer, Nera discovers how magical and colourful and beautiful the world her father has stridently shut out can be.
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Set against a background of death and grief and loss, you might wonder if there is much scope for wondrous newness and life in The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World, but rest assured there is, and while Charlie has her own dark road to travel and can’t look past mistakes she feels she made when her sister died, it is Nera coming to life that really gives the novel a boisterously hopeful feel.
Charlie is on her way to working through her grief but hers is an altogether different journey and its a testament to Dawson’s movingly nuanced writing that this has so much humanity imbued into it and we see both the darkness and the life of what it feels like to be embroiled and lost in grief and loss and pain.