The Lightkeeper's Wife

Mary the Bruny Island ex-lightkeeper's wife returns to the island off the east coast of Tasmania in poor health and with a secret that she resists revealing to her three adult children. She raised these children in the isolation and wildness of the island before the light was mechanised. Now they live scattered on the mainland avoiding each other and memories of their childhood.

On Bruny Island Mary compels Leon the ranger to take her about and she gradually builds a relationship with him. Part of her story is revealed in her interaction with him and part in her memory of the places he takes her to. As a teenager Mary's parents banished her to Bruny Island to prevent an unsuitable liaison.  She met the steady boy Jack on a neighbouring farm and married him, but the embers of her first love remained ready to burst into flame.

Much of the book is taken up with Mary's attempt to recall, relive and understand the years she spent with Jack on Bruny Island. The difficulties of married life in isolated circumstances, where two people provide the only adult company for each other, are examined and later compared to the Antarctic experience of separation of couples for many months. 

Mary's story is told from a third person point of view but her son Tom's story is told in the first person. All the other reviews of this book see the novel as primarily Mary's story but I disagree.  The first person POV of Tom's story makes his thoughts and pain more understandable and his experiences more immediate. As the book progresses we spend more time in his head than Mary's and at the end the secret that Mary has carried through the novel is the answer to his unsettled and troubled way of being in the world. 

The most fluid writing in this novel is in the descriptions of the Antarctic landscape and life on the bases down there. In Karen Vigger's other life she is a wildlife veterinarian and has summered down in the Antarctic.  She captures the changes in light, human reaction to emerging from the darkness of constant winter and the ephemeral but intense nature of contingent relationships and small community life so exactly that she can only have experienced it herself. 

Although Karen's voice is confident and the story mostly compelling, some of the sentence construction and transitions are somewhat awkward. While she 'shows' most of the story some of it is 'told' and these are the least engaging sections. This is not high literature but it is a good story well told and in the main well controlled. This is a story of life on the margins of Australia, on Bruny Island and Antarctic bases, and of solitary people shouldering burdens and keeping secrets from others who could have shared and eased the load.