The Lighthouse – Alison Moore

The second of my post-real-time reviews (following the recent completion of all my previous real-time reviews ).

THE LIGHTHOUSE – a novel by Alison Moore (2012)

Salt Publishing – Cromer

The Guardian video — Why The Lighthouse should win the 2012 Booker Prize – is a brilliant summation of this (I expect) memorable novel … and so why add my own review? Well, it’s a story about a perfume container, various smells, a road movie (for one person, not two) except it’s a hike not a car journey (other than the sporadic flat tyres) and involves other points of view in Germany, other points of time. A laid-back, disarming panoply of relationships that uses language sparely to tell of itself, with richly felt undercurrents as we travel from deceptively, craftily, emotionally low-key foray to foray … with a disarming brutality, too, that comes home to roost in a shuffle-toed, almost dead-pan narrative that includes baths, childhoods, cinematic sarabandes — and Proustian perfumes as leitmotifs towards a haunting gestalt.

Well, why my own review, I ask? I was originally trying to relate it to my own identification of something I called ‘Pronoun Horror’ in this very author’s short story in ‘The Screaming Book of Horror’ that I very recently reviewed here. I, me, you, she, he, us, them: as wafting parfumeries, like a morse code of Proustian selves from phare to phare, ferry to ferry…