THE ILLUMINATIONS

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Andrew O'Hagan's fifth novel is a beautiful, deeply charged story about love and memory, about modern war and the complications of fact.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Is truth the mere solidity of fact, wrestled from the world, or something to be gathered through imaginative force-through, as it were, illumination? Once a distinguished documentary photographer now fading into old age and forgetfulness, Anne Quirk would certainly argue for the latter, and though she's uninterested in her placidly earthbound daughter, she loves grandson Luke, a thinker and wild-eyed "child and a half" now struggling to put his perceptions to use as a captain with the British Army's Royal Western Fusiliers in Afghanistan. It might seem an odd choice of career, but Luke's father was a soldier who died in Northern Ireland, not the only sense of loss in this book. Harry Blake, the love of Anne's life, is mysteriously out of the picture-the truth of that made painfully clear at the end-and we learn that Anne's bossy neighbor Maureen feels bitterly that her children neglect her. A sense of scrappy misunderstanding between parent and child prevails throughout this urgent and graceful novel by Scottish author O'Hagan (Be Near Me), but the true collision of truths comes in Afghanistan as a mission gone terribly wrong leaves Luke deeply disillusioned. Taking Alice to her old home in Blackpool to see the famous Illuminations (a nighttime light display) is his way of coping, and it ends the novel with a lit-up sense of how we grope hopefully toward others-and toward a larger understanding. Verdict Perhaps the buildup to Luke's one horrible moment in Afghanistan feels a bit slow, but the payoff is there, and the novel as a whole demonstrates the psychological acuity and beautiful writing that typify O'Hagan's work. [See Prepub Alert, 9/8/14.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

This empathetic novel from O'Hagan (Our Fathers) revolves around a fictional, largely unknown photographer named Anne Quirk, and Luke, her grandson, who serves in the British Army. Anne suffers from dementia and lives in a retirement community. Luke is serving in Afghanistan, where he listens to death metal, gets stoned, and watches the war tear apart his mentor, Major Scullion. In her youth, Anne was a sharp woman, with a keen eye for beauty in the commonplace. Luke often reminisces on the moments they had together, and the ways she encouraged him to look closely at the world around him. When Luke was 12, she took him to Dunure Harbour, where "they stood holding hands on the jetty, the wind pushing them back as they took great gulps of air. 'Breathe, Luke!' she said. 'You can't argue with that! Fresh wind off the sea. Oh my. I wish I could catch it with the camera.'?" As Anne's memory deteriorates, Luke seeks out details about her life and discovers a life marked by tragedy and self-deceit. O'Hagan sympathetically dissects how falsehoods burrow into daily life; his story provides a deeply felt urge to look more closely at the world and those we love. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Battles are being waged. Luke Campbell is in Afghanistan, trying to keep his unit together while their commanding officer slowly has a breakdown. Back in the UK, Luke's grandmother Anne is fighting off dementia with the help of her kindly neighbor Maureen but losing. When Luke's unit is involved in a terrible massacre the result of a long, boiling day of bad decisions Luke returns home to help his family move Anne to a nursing home. Anne, a one-time photographer who abandoned her craft, and Luke, the prototypical soldier-scholar, are close, which is particularly painful for Anne's daughter Alice, who has always been neglected and scorned by her mother. O'Hagan is good at depicting army life in Afghanistan but even better at depicting family warfare. With each phone call, visit, outing to a café, he reveals the subtle and insidious ways we sabotage the relationships that could prove to be our greatest source of strength and joy. Luke's regimental motto, Veritas vos liberabit,proves to be the key to his torn family and national loyalties and illuminates a personal path that is both honest and compassionate.--Weber, Lynn Copyright 2015 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

The Scottish author's fifth novel (The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of his friend Marilyn Monroe, 2010, etc.) is a lean yet rich family story built of small and crucial moments in memories and reality across three generations. Anne, at 82, has come to a kind of assisted living facility on Scotland's west coast, and her memory has begun drifting. Often she returns to a time in the 1950s when she was a talented photographer and had a child with another shutterbug. When her grandson, Luke, a British army captain fighting in the Afghanistan campaign of recent years, enters the narrative, it shifts from homey prose snapshots to harsh newsreel realism. The contrast recalls a long article by O'Hagan, also a well-regarded essayist, that looks at deaths in the Iraqi campaign and those affected at home; titled "Brothers," it's among the collected nonfiction in The Atlantic Ocean (2013). Anne and Luke have always been close, and he returns after a nightmarish ambush in Afghanistan to help her in the transition to a nursing home. In the process, he discovers long-concealed secrets and sadness tied to another coastal town, Blackpool, which is famous for the annual lighting ceremony that gives the book the literal stratum of its many-layered title. Family pain comes in many forms, including the exclusion Luke's mother feels from the special tie he has with Anne, the very mixed feelings of Anne's ever helpful neighbor toward her own brood when they visit the facilityeven Luke's father-brother relations with his fellow soldiers. The story is ripe for sentimentality, but there's a journalistic cast to the spare prose and tight dialogue that helps O'Hagan almost always avoid it. It's remarkable how much human territory O'Hagan explores and illuminates with a restrained style that also helps drive the novel along at a good clip. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.