The Lamplighters: Emma Stonex

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In all my years I’ve realised there are two kinds of people. The ones who hear a creak in a dark, lonely house, and shut the windows because it must have been the wind. And the ones who hear a creak in a dark, lonely house, light a candle, and go to take a look.”

Book Review: The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex | Theresa Smith Book Review: The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex | Theresa Smith

Hatred, distrust, lies and an unexpected sort of love binds these women in an elegant novel that is as interested in the notion of hope and acceptance as it is in murder and revenge. So, if you’ve read The Lamplighters and want to know more about the book’s ending, keep reading. Below you will find my thoughts as to what happens at the end of book – The Lamplighters ending explained.

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I found clingy home-maker Jenny the least likeable character (with Bill a close second) and I was really routing for jail-bird Vince until I found out he killed a dog, which I suspect says more about my own prejudices and unbalanced thinking than the story itself! I cared about Arthur and Helen and all that they had been through. As the story concludes, Helen sees two figures waiting for her under a yew tree, and she recognizes them as Jenny and Michelle, the wives of the missing lighthouse keepers. The atmosphere that Stonex so cleverly creates is why The Lamplighters reads as more than a mystery novel. The Maiden exists in that liminal spot between land and sea, and the novel exists in a similar space where the worlds of the natural and supernatural dissolve into each other. Bill tells us, “there are keepers who stay so long on the towers they start to hear mermaids.” Do the keepers, driven mad through solitude, imagine the mermaids? Or are their senses sharpened so they can hear better than we can? Helen believes the men’s disappearance is a terrible accident covered up by their employers, Trident. Jenny suspects a strange supernatural event. Who is right? How can we know? The book does not exclude any version of events but treads the line between them with, for the most part, the lightest of footfalls. Seabirds appear like omens, there’s a Silver Man who could be a drug-dealer but is reported to occupy two places at once. Always we have a sense that if you turn around fast enough you might catch sight of … something … out of the corner of your eye.

The Lamplighters - Book Ending Explained - Wrote a Book The Lamplighters - Book Ending Explained - Wrote a Book

Stars. I wish to extend my heartfelt thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins Canada for this atmospheric and haunting book. Its author, Emma Stonex, was inspired by the mysterious, unsolved disappearance of three lighthouse keepers in 1900 from a lighthouse in the Outer Hebrides. Interesting accounts of this true disappearance can be found by googling the Eilean Mor lighthouse. Three lighthouse men have disappeared whilst on shift at the lighthouse, the building is empty and they have vanished without a trace. Twenty years later, the women they left behind are still struggling to move on. Helen, Jenny and Michelle should have been united by the tragedy, but instead it drove them apart. Now, they have a chance to tell their side of the story. But only in confronting their darkest fears can the truth begin to surface . . . What happened to those three men, out on the tower? The heavy sea whispers their names. The tide shifts beneath the swell, drowning ghosts. Can their secrets ever be recovered from the waves?Yet rather than the mystery, it is the complicated relationship between the three women left behind that is most vivid. Graceful, middle-class Helen faithfully tending her dead husband’s flame, mousy Jenny who wants to put it all behind her and Michelle who was very young when she met Vince and has built a new life. This book appealed to me because I LOVE atmospheric stories, and a bit of Supernatural. The mystery of what might have occurred was intriguing. If a student of taste wants to know the thoughts and feelings of the majority who lived during Franklin Pierce's administration [1853–57], he will find more positive value in Maria Cummins' The Lamplighter or T.S. Arthur's Ten Nights in a Bar-Room than he will in Thoreau's Walden [the former being far more popular] – all books published in 1854.... Usually the book that is popular pleases the reader because it is shaped by the same forces that mold his non-reading hours, so that its dispositions and convictions, its language and subject, re-create the sense of the present, to die away as soon as that present becomes the past. [3] At the cemetery, Helen meets Dan Martin, the writer who had been researching the disappearance of the lighthouse keepers and had spoken to Helen years ago, without revealing his true identity.

The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex | Waterstones The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex | Waterstones

There was something I really enjoyed in this book, however. For a debut novel, it was oozing with atmosphere and relevant details of life as a lighthouse keeper. In 1900 three lighthouse keepers disappeared from the Eilean Mor lighthouse in the Outer Hebrides. They were never found and there has been no explanation for their vanishing. In a well constructed novel, Emma Stonex reimagines this event by transposing the time to 1972 and the location to the rugged coast of Cornwall.The result is a multi layered novel that fuses atmosphere and mystery with personal and societal psychology.

Anyone who grew up in Scotland in the 70s and early 80s can tell you about the lighthouse keepers of the remote Flannan Isles in the Outer Hebrides in the early 20th century. The story of the three men who settled down to eat only to seemingly vanish into thin air haunted my childhood – and it would appear that of Emma Stonex too. The author’s first novel under her own name transports the location to the close-knit but still remote Cornish coast and updates the action, plausibly, to 1972 – an era when mobile phones don’t exist – before flashing forward to 1992 when an investigative journalist believes he has uncovered the truth but needs the men’s very different widows and girlfriends to prove it. And while much of the novel is inspired by history—particularly the Flannan Isles Disappearance of 1900—Stonex has also included just enough otherworldly strangeness to give The Lamplighters an eerie campfire air: It was these characters I was fascinated by. The more I examined the original story, the more brightly shone its most captivating feature: the psychology of the people involved. What did it take in a man to work on a lighthouse, trapped in the sea with no one around for miles except the two he was with? How did these absences impact on a marriage? For women in the 1970s, being a lighthouse keeper’s wife could be either oppressive or liberating, depending on which way she looked at it. Some pined for their husbands and hated the sea for carrying him away: their lives couldn’t resume until he returned home. Others embraced a chance at a different way of life, to be head of the household at a time when this position was largely retained by men. Helen in The Lamplighters admits to being content on her own: ‘You’ve had things your way for eight weeks,’ she explains, ‘and suddenly he’s the master of the house and you have to play second fiddle. It could be very unsettling. It’s not a conventional marriage. Ours certainly wasn’t.’ Each of the characters was broken in some way, which just added to feel of this book following on the same trend of cliched mystery novels of recent years. This was not unlike a Ruth Ware novel.