[FZL]≫ PDF Free The Alphabet of Light and Dark Danielle Wood 9781741140651 Books

The Alphabet of Light and Dark Danielle Wood 9781741140651 Books

Download As PDF : The Alphabet of Light and Dark Danielle Wood 9781741140651 Books

The Alphabet of Light and Dark Danielle Wood 9781741140651 Books

Delightfully woven story with such evocative descriptions of Bruny Island it made me want to visit. A clever blend of historical events with the main character's fictional past and present.


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The Alphabet of Light and Dark Danielle Wood 9781741140651 Books Reviews

The Cape Bruny Lighthouse, at the southern tip of Bruny Island off the south-east coast of Tasmania is the setting for Ms Wood’s novel. The main character, Essie Lewis, is an oceanographer and aspiring author who goes to Cape Bruny both to research her family’s past and to try to find meaning in her own life. In the novel, in italics, we read fragments of the book Essie is writing. Written as a first-hand contemporary account, Essie writes of her great-great grandfather’s experiences on Bruny Island in the late 1800s. Her account captures this period, with the hardships endured by lighthouse families, the isolation from others and the difficult physical environment.

‘Essie remembers that in stories it is often the silent who end up with the task of the telling.’

The current caretaker of the lighthouse is Pete Shelverton, hunter of feral cats and part-time sculptor. As children, Essie and Peter knew each other briefly, as adults they recognize each other as kindred spirits. The past holds a fascination for Essie, but what of the present, and the future? And what about Peter?

‘She knows the things that the light can’t see, the things beneath the surface that pull and suck.’

I enjoyed the setting for this novel lighthouses have their own form of magic. While Ms Wood recreates life at the Cape Bruny Lighthouse during the nineteenth century through Essie’s writing, its significance in the twenty-first century is not lost. The light itself is automated now, but lives are still attracted by it and caught up within it. While the characters of Essie and Pete are interesting, I found myself more drawn to the past, to the constant presence and role of the lighthouse.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith
The Alphabet of Light and Dark is the first novel by award-winning Australian author, Danielle Wood. Bruny Island, a comma that follows the Island of Tasmania in the Southern Ocean, has a lighthouse that used to warn ships of treacherous reefs and rocks (now replaced by an automated beacon on the point). While Pete Shelverton waits to find out if he’s going back to Macquarie Island to help reduce the feral cat population, he’ll clean and polish inside it once a week. Essie Lewis is spending twelve weeks in the adjacent Lightkeepers’ Quarters II because there’s family history in the lighthouse about which she wants to write.

Essie’s beloved grandfather, Charlie Westwood, has died, and she has just a small seaman’s chest of papers, photos and familiar objects, and her memories of his tales “The great web of Charlie’s stories, in her memory, is a net full of holes. ‘I have repairs to make.’ How can she stitch them back together, these solid things, using only the fragile wisps of story she has left?”

Pete is still smarting from a broken relationship “Now he has to try to do his forgetting here, on another island. But there’s no walking like that any more, and he’s so fit there’s hardly anything he can do that hurts enough, that makes enough pain to fill every last cul-de-sac of his mind… The only thing that gives him any relief is this pile of metal. He doesn’t sleep much. He spends his nights out here in the shed with the blue breath of the welder, the flow of molten metal, connecting piece to piece.”

Wood uses three narrative strands the present day’s events are told from both Essie’s and Pete’s perspectives; Essie’s fictionalised history of her grandfather’s grandfather, Superintendent of the Cape Bruny Lightstation for almost forty years, comes from Alva, his daughter. The story moves at a sedate pace, as Wood establishes her main protagonists. Both are locals, returning to Bruny after years away, and it is only at the halfway point that they encounter each other again.

Both Pete and Essie are somewhat solitary figures, and neither of them is entirely comfortable in company. But still, “Lying there in the black and quiet, Essie feels her aloneness, and wonders how far in each direction a line would travel before it met another person. She wonders how great is the diameter of her solitude. This night, it feels vast.”

Wood's descriptive prose is often exquisite, and likely to engender a desire to see and touch Pete’s sculptures and Charlie’s saved objects. People, too, are wonderfully portrayed “Her Grandma’s love was smooth as cream, it was a tide that flowed out over everyone evenly. Friends, relatives, the babies in their mothers’ arms in supermarket queues, stray cats and dogs. But Charlie was a hard bastard as far as the world was concerned, and the softness he held in store for his granddaughter was one of the only things Essie possessed all for herself.”

Wood gives the reader a plot that is easily believable, dialogue that is natural and a conclusion full of hope. Of her characters Charlie is likely to be a stand out favourite, larger than life, which is not surprising as he is inspired by Wood's own grandfather, as is the great great grandfather of the story. Both have very human flaws, as do most of the characters, who nonetheless have plenty of appeal. Evocative and moving, this is a brilliant debut novel.
A brilliant read - incredible insight into people and what shapes them. I have recommended this book to many people.
Delightfully woven story with such evocative descriptions of Bruny Island it made me want to visit. A clever blend of historical events with the main character's fictional past and present.