He likes basing fiction on real people: Lena Zavaroni in Personality, Marilyn Monroe in Maf the Dog. He’s never been afraid of hard subjects – vanished children in The Missing, child abuse in Be Near Me. You’ve got to go out eventually and test it all against reality.” O’Hagan is a reporter and a journalist (and Julian Assange’s one-time ghostwriter) as well as a novelist. Similarly, Major Scullion advises Luke: “People who read books aren’t reading them properly if they stop with the books. “Get out of the studio!” Harry Blake tells Anne. Like his characters, O’Hagan makes fictional shapes out of real facts, and believes in going outside the world of books. The novel works its way between the two to explore, with some difficulty and strain, where value or truth might be recovered. The virtuosity of the novel, and also its riskiness, is in the violent contrast between the world of women, families and art, and the world of war. Anne’s personal self-deceptions and secrets run alongside the young man’s appalled sense of what’s gone missing from his life.
![illuminations book illuminations book](https://marysharratt.com/main/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/illuminations.jpg)
Any pride in what he’s been doing in the army, any sense of nationhood, is gone “sanctioned brutality” is all it has been. Luke’s platoon is led into an ambush and a catastrophic panic-stricken slaughter of civilians, and of soldiers, at a wedding party. “Bring it on, bitch,” said Private Dooley. “It’s the South Armagh of Afghanistan out there, nothing but Terry Taliban waiting behind the wall to chop your balls off and send them back to your mammy.” The rough banter of the army boys from Glasgow, Cork and Liverpool, the corroded hectoring of the regiment’s Major Scullion (a Conradian Kurtz figure), the savage facts of what it’s really like out there, require a different kind of language, from Luke and from his narrator:
![illuminations book illuminations book](https://rarebooksfinder.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/979-6.jpg)
“The glass cabinet described their shared interest in the gathering of facts, their attempt to know life not only by our mistakes but by artistic ordering.”Īll that is put behind him when, as Captain Campbell, he’s with his platoon in Afghanistan, on a mission to train the Afghan army, to get equipment 100 miles from Camp Bastion to the Kajaki dam, and to take control of the dam from the Taliban. When he was a small boy in Glasgow, she kept a glass cabinet of his seashells and starfish for him.
#ILLUMINATIONS BOOK HOW TO#
The novel’s other half belongs to that 29-year-old son, Luke, a literary boy who read English at Strathclyde (like his author), knows Hardy, Kipling and Wallace Stevens, and has been taught by his grandmother how to look at life, how to think and hope she has trained his “better self”. It’s illuminated partly through the resentful attention of her daughter –whose husband was a soldier killed in Ireland, whose son is stationed in Helmand, and whose point of view we come increasingly to understand. Anne’s history, like her failing memory, comes to light in patches, spots of light. Her work – part still lifes of kitchen sinks, part street-scene realism – was mentored by her long-vanished lover, Harry Blake, a pioneering documentary photographer and the father of her child. Canadian-Scottish Anne Quirk – neglectful mother but devoted grandmother, object of fascination to her self-pitying neighbour Maureen – was once, it turns out, a remarkable photographer. One half is set in a retirement home on the coast of Ayrshire, where an 82-year-old woman with early-stage dementia is living.
It moves with bold, imaginative daring and a troubled intensity between men at war and women with their children, between Scotland and Afghanistan, between photography and fiction, and between memory and secrets. The novel, like its two main characters, has a double life. 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”.
![illuminations book illuminations book](https://s18670.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/Reading-Nooks-Eberharts-Explorers.jpg)
“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. L ights 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.