The Light Between Oceans

I am not one of these people who gets upset when books get turned into movies, for me it's quite exciting to see stories I've loved brought to life off the page. Sometimes I've even discovered really good books on account of the fact I've seen trailers for movies that have then prompted me to go and find out more about the book itself.

I already knew a bit about The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman and had heard it highly recommended and it had been hiding on my e-reader with a promise that at some point I'd get around to reading it. Then I came across the trailer for the movie which is due to be released in October and I suddenly felt a burning urge to ensure I read it before I watch the adaptation to the big screen and I am very pleased I did and a little perplexed as to what took so long.

The Light Between Oceans is a story of a lighthouse keeper who moves to take over a new posting on a tiny island off the coast of Australia shortly after the end of the first World War. It is a remote island where the keeper can spend many months alone until the arrival of supplies by boat and they may not step foot ashore beside other people for years at a time. On one of his early trips back to the mainland he meets and falls in love with Isabel, the daughter of the local school headmaster and they begin corresponding and eventually marry and she moves with him back to his tiny island of Janus.

Their marriage is a happy one initially but is soon blighted by many miscarriages and stillbirths and it is shortly after the stillbirth of their son that a boat is washed up ashore on their tiny island containing the body of a stranger and his tiny baby daughter. Isabel is bereft from the loss of her own child and craving a child of her own and she persuades her husband that no one will know if they keep the tiny baby and say she is their own, after all the mother must also have drowned in the boat.

It's a story where we feel the happiness of the family, there are only 3 of them on the island and they create their own little world together. They are happy and the little girl, whom they name Lucy, is loved beyond measure. They bring her home when they eventually get shore leave some 2 years later and introduce her to Isabel's family and prepare for Lucy's christening. It is then that they hear the story of a local woman whose husband and infant daughter were lost at sea approximately 2 years before and they realise that the mother they assumed to be dead is very much alive.

This is a book of complex emotions as a reader because you can feel Isabel's pain, you can understand her choices and why under the weight of such intense grief and loss for her own baby she finds it easy to take the baby washed up ashore and use her as a way to fill that loss, choosing to persuade her husband to keep the baby. However as the book progresses we learn that whilst she has filled the gap left behind she has also developed a fierce protectiveness over her daughter that means that even when faced with another grieving mother seeking closure for her daughter lost at sea she cannot be truthful and admit what she has done. Instead she works tirelessly to justify her actions, to almost blackmail her husband into staying quiet with emotional threats.

One of the quotes that really stood out to me in the book to help understand Isabel's feeling was the one that read “As a fourteen-year-old, Isabel had searched the dictionary. She knew that if a wife lost a husband, there was a whole new word to describe who she was: she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a parent lost a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or a daughter. That seemed odd.”

Tom is an entirely different character because he has no less love for the child but instead of feeling this as a signal to stay quiet about what they've done he finds his guilt presses him to want to reassure the mother that her child is safe. He is seeking redemption for his actions as a soldier during the war and as a way of righting his wrongs he feels pressed to contact the other woman anonymously and let her know that her child is safe and loved.

The moral dilemma in this book is that we know that Tom is doing the right thing, the thing we like to think we would all do but we can understand the anger that Isabel feels at him for doing so, the increasing panic she feels that her child will be ripped from her. We want their child to remain theirs but we also know she doesn't belong there. This is a wonderful book full of complex emotions and characters who are all essentially likeable and doing the things they feel are right and at the heart of the book is a child who is dearly loved by two families instead of just by one.

I have a feeling this will be a wonderful story on the big screen and that there will be many people who haven't read the book who fall in love with the wonderful story. I cannot recommend it highly enough and will be desperate to see it as soon as I can to contrast it with it's book version.