Funny, I’d remembered it by someone more famous, but can’t recall who I had in mind. I couldn’t remember who sang it an online search brought up someone called Erika Eigen. PS The novel reminded me (incongruously, given the darkness of its plot) of that jaunty, cheesy song ‘I want to marry a lighthouse keeper’. Maybe I’m missing something, but I’d rather read Barbara Pym or Anita Brookner. If Emma Stonex had trimmed the length considerably this could have worked as a Stephen King kind of mystery with spooky overtones. ![]() The boredom of the men’s routine seeps into the narrative in ways that renders it tedious. The narrative is flat and often tone deaf, despite some vivid descriptions of the seascapes. It should be a riveting thriller – but it’s often slack and unengaging. The women have tensions of their own between them too. A visit from a man purporting to be a repair engineer becomes a sort of demonic intrusion – he seems to know all their secrets. It’s structured in alternating time periods: 1972, in which the events leading up to the disappearance are narrated, from the viewpoint of the three keepers, and 1992, when the local writer interviews the widows of the two older men, and the woman who’d been the youngest’s girlfriend at the time.Īll three men have secrets and clandestine motives for either doing away with the others, or for feeling threatened by criminal or other menacing outside forces. I found the novel much too long, however. There’s probably a good short story or novella in here somewhere. Spectral figures and supernatural emanations are described – but these could also be a consequence of the keepers’ enforced solitude and increasingly fragile sanity. All kinds of outlandish theories about what happened to the men are aired, some of them as far-fetched as those that followed the Flannan Isle disappearance. ![]() Trident House, the organisation that administers the Cornish lighthouse, is intent on covering up what happened to the three men, and pays the widows hush money, admonishing them not to speak to outside investigators (like a local author, who has reasons of his own for investigating what happened). The three black seabirds – too large to be shags, says the poem, hinting at something sinister – seem to be the vanished keepers transformed. I remember reading it at school: it left a deep impression on me. There’s an epigraph at the start from the 1912 poem by WW Gibson, ‘Flannan Isle’, about a similarly strange disappearance of three lighthouse keepers from a Victorian lighthouse off the Outer Hebrides. ![]() With a hint of the supernatural: strange white birds seem to haunt the place. It’s a classic ‘locked room (murder?) mystery’, then. Marc Calhoun, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons The lighthouse on Eilean Mor (Flannan Isles): attribution –
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