When I first picked up this book, I thought the title was referring to an entire continent. I was intrigued by the idea that the title was reducing a whole continent down that way, as simple the light between two oceans. As it turns out, the title is both more literal and more metaphorical.
The main characters are Tom and Isabel, and the story is told largely through Tom's eyes, although the omnipotent narrator provides insight into the other characters increasingly more often as the book continues.
The story begins as Tom returns from the Great War to Western Australia, where he begins tending lighthouses for the government. The work is governed by strict rules and an order that Tom finds appealing after his experiences at war. At one point he says that rules are what prevent man from becoming savages. He clings to the safety of this order as well as his dedication to something he perceives to be larger than himself - the Janus lighthouse guiding ships safely around the southwestern corner of Australia, situated between the Indian and Great Southern Oceans.
When he arrives at Partageuse (the port to reach Janus), he meets Isabel - young, mischievous, beautiful - who later becomes his wife. He and Isabel live alone on Janus, and their life together seems at first wild and idyllic. Tom needs the peace of Janus, and Isabel appreciates the freedom from the strictures of society and from the grief that smothers her family after the loss of her two brothers. Only later, in memories, do we discover how lonely Isabel is on this isolated island with her husband, a reserved man battling demons from his own childhood in addition to those he gathered in the war.
Everything changes for the pair when a dinghy washes ashore containing a dead man and a baby. Isabel, distraught over her third miscarriage, convinces Tom to go against everything he clings to in order to keep the child who they name Lucy. They claim the child as their own, and it is this decision that begins to pick and tear at the small rifts in their relationship. Years later when Lucy is a toddler, they find out that the child's mother is still alive, grieving for her lost husband and child.
Tom's eventual decision to contact the mother rips them apart, and Lucy from them both. Isabel and Tom have become the oceans, and Lucy had been the light between them. With their family now in ruins and the subject of both public scrutiny and a legal investigation, it's up to Tom and Isabel to find their way back to each other without her light to guide them. It's no surprise that the little girl's original name was Grace, but the resolution depends not on the child, but on Isabel and Tom's own love for each other. The end of the book is stirring, and would have been further improved if it had been cut off about 4 pages sooner. An unfortunately trite ending, I think, spoils the sad beauty and realism Stedman spent a whole book building.
Nevertheless, the power in this book comes from the strength Stedman shows in each of his main characters, including latecomer Hannah. The resolutions to their problems come from deep introspection and a desire to deal with the past when those around them would brush it aside in an effort to move forward. The entire town of Partageuse is gripped by the war, each of them affected so profoundly by events thousands of miles away. Only when the characters acknowledge their individual losses can they stop hurting each other and themselves.
I want to give the book more stars simply for the setting alone, as well as the detail and care Stedman gives to describing the care of the lighthouse. However, I can't get over the ending, nor the fact that Isabel could be a much deeper character than she is. When Tom is stoic, Isabel is hysterical. Where Tom is giving, Isabel is vicious. The dichotomy prevents the characters from taking on the kind of depth I think they could have.
M. L. Stedman lives in London, but given that she was born and raised in, and chose to write about, Western Australia, I'm counting this as an Australian book. Tom has just returned from the Great War, and the events of the story are shaped in large part by the grieving and recovery process of everyone involved. So I'm counting this toward my Great War list too.
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