![]() ![]() ![]() His childishness is remarkable: in one episode Futh, fully-grown physically at least, is smacked by his father for speaking out of turn. Indeed, it is as if his development was arrested the moment his mother left, and everything else is seen through the lens of that departure, that void. It feels the way it felt when his mother left.įuth is lost in the present, at home only vaguely in the past. It feels like something peeled and bleeding. Time and again Futh ends up in the middle of others’ problems but is too inept to realise it and suffers as a consequence. He is constantly outrun and unbalanced by the actions of other people: the aggressive cuckolded hotel-manager, whose wife desires his mother’s silver lighthouse perfume case, his father’s women, and his bored wife who echoes the mother who left him as a child. Futh’s very name is an awkward monosyllabic cotton-woollish and wholly unmemorable sound. The middle-aged and recently separated Futh is going on a walking-tour in Germany to clear his head before returning to a single life in a flat full of boxes his soon-to-be-ex-wife, Angela, had to pack for this stunningly ineffectual man. In The Lighthouse Alison Moore has created an unsettling, seemingly becalmed but oddly sensual, and entirely excellent novel. ![]() Part of the Man Booker Prize 2012 Longlist Series. ![]()
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