The Alphabet of Light and Dark

by Danielle Wood

Melding personal, familial, and colonial history, this evocative novel explores the importance of love, family, and self-discovery. A few trinkets found in a sea chest and the fragmented memories of her grandfather's tall tales are all Essie Lewis has left of her family history. After her grandfather's death, Essie returns to Bruny Island, Tasmania, and to the lighthouse where her great-great-grandfather kept watch for nearly 40 years. Beneath the lighthouse, she begins to write the stories of her ancestors. But the island is also home to Pete Shelverton, a sculptor who hunts feral cats to make his own peace with the past. As Essie writes, she finds that Pete is a part of the history she can never escape.

Genres: Australia, Fiction, Tasmania, Literature, Contemporary, Literary Fiction

348 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Danielle Wood was born in Hobart in 1972. Danielle has an arts degree from the University of Tasmania, and a PhD from Edith Cowan University. She has worked as a journalist, as a producer with ABC Radio, and as a media officer for Tasmania's Parks and Wildlife Service. Her first novel, The Alphabet of Light and Dark won the 2002 The Australian/Vogel's Literary Award, was the winner of the 2004 Dobbie Literary Award, commended in 2004 in the FAW Christina Stead Award for Fiction, shortlisted for the 2004 Commonwealth Writer's Prize in the Best First Book category for the SE Asia and South Pacific Region, and nominated for the 2005 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Her latest novel, Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls was published by Allen & Unwin in 2006.

Danielle is currently teaching creative writing at the University of Tasmania.

Reviews

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

According to Wikipedia, there is a category of fiction labelled Tasmanian Gothic, and The Alphabet of Light and Dark falls squarely within it. The sub-genre is described thus: "Although it deals with the themes of horror, mystery and the uncanny, Tasmanian Gothic literature and art differs from traditional European Gothic Literature, which is rooted in medieval imagery, crumbling Gothic architecture and religious ritual. Instead, the Tasmanian gothic tradition centres on the natural landscape of Tasmania and its colonial architecture and history." This is the first time I've heard the term 'Tasmanian Gothic' but it clicked instantly - it's the perfect way to neatly capture the atmosphere and essence of Danielle Wood's haunting and beautiful first novel.

The present-day portions of the novel are set largely on Bruny Island, in the south of Tasmania, in 1999. Essie Lewis, only child of a university professor who's gone 'walkabout' on a global scale, and a mother who died of cancer when Essie was young, was brought up between her father, an environmentalist, and her grandfather, a successful businessman in hydro-electricity who began life in poverty. From her grandfather, Charlie, she learns stories from the past, pieces of her ancestors and others. When Charlie dies, in 1999, Essie puts her life as a marine scientist in Perth on hold, takes Charlie's ute and drives to Bruny Island, where she rents one of the shacks by the lighthouse where her great-great-grandfather was superintendent in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

She has a key to the lighthouse, now disused in favour of a more modern version nearby, and during the next several cold months, she spends a lot of time up by the light, with the postcard photo of a young Alva, a girl - her great-great-grandparents' daughter - who was born here. Alva looks just like Essie, and ever since Essie saw the picture when she was a child, she's been drawn to her long-dead relative. Now, using the bits and pieces of stories from her grandfather, her great-great-grandfather's log books, and some random things bequeathed to her by Charlie - among them a carved coconut; a tiny coin; a stone seamed in bright quartz and mica and bits of garnet; and a coiled plait of pale hair - Essie writes Alva's story, a story that Essie starts to recognise is really her own.

Also on the island is Pete Shelverton, a man also trying to find a measure of peace within himself. A chance meeting between Pete and Essie rekindles an old friendship that goes back to when they were children, but some history seems too hard to surmount, or escape.

At its heart, this is a story about belonging, and place, and time. As such, it's a deeply moving, beautiful, haunting book, a story that artfully, even subtly, bridges the gaps of time. Essie is uprooted, aimless, un-anchored. While she has an apartment in Perth, she has recently broken up with her boyfriend, David, and has no real attachment to the city. She likes things clean, sterile almost, and minimalist. She likes things to match, and colours to complement. She's organised, and introspective, and hard to reach, emotionally. She misses her mother, but it's as if her father doesn't like to share his grief over her passing; for several years after her mother died, Essie didn't speak. At the lighthouse on Bruny Island, she becomes hermit-like and absorbed in the past, and the act of creation, of bringing Alva to life. In the process, she feels close to truths her grandfather wouldn't have told her.

Likewise, Peter is a loner, a man who is content in his own company and solitude, who has spent months at a time on Macquarie Island, south of Tasmania, hunting the feral cats that live there and decimate the wildlife. After one such stint, he came home to discover his girlfriend couldn't, and didn't, wait for him. He waits eagerly, impatiently and with a sense of anxiety for word to come from the department, to hear he will be going back in September. Once he encounters Essie, though, things slowly start to shift inside him. Both Essie and Pete subconsciously recognise that it is through our relationships with others, especially real, deep and intimate relationships, that we find our sense of place and belonging.

The Cape Bruny lighthouse is one I've visited, incidentally, many many years ago: it's not something you're likely to forget any time, because it's at the edge of a promontory, perched above jagged, black, precipitous cliffs against which the sea violently hurls itself. I remember looking down at those thundering waves and feeling so incredibly insignificant, so incredibly mortal and fragile. It wasn't a particularly cold or overcast day, but this spot seemed to hold its own, stormier weather. This is my memory, at least, but aside from a mention of cliffs, this image doesn't feature in The Alphabet of Light and Dark. (I actually started to wonder whether I'd confused it with some other lighthouse, somewhere else in the state, but after a quick search online I found this picture that somewhat confirmed it, though it's probably that my memory has bridged gaps and isn't wholly accurate. That in itself is quite fascinating, though, and ties into the concept of the Gothic nicely: that I would associate such turbulent waters and cliffs with a colonial lighthouse.)

The lighthouse itself acts like a touchstone, a solid colonial object of mystery and romance, of light and dark (the 'alphabet of light and dark' is, literally, explained as the spaces between flashes - each lighthouse is different, so you can identify, at night, which lighthouse you're near [p.128]). I 'waxed lyrical' on lighthouses and what they symbolise in my recent review of The Light Between Oceans , so I'll point you in that direction rather than repeat myself here - suffice it to say, that the lighthouse serves much the same purpose here. Now with the added perspective of the 'Tasmanian gothic', the lighthouse takes on another layer - or really, everything about lighthouses can be summed up by the term. For Essie, it's a place of comfort, too. A true anchor in her mourning and sense of floating. Pete is the one who keeps it clean, coming every couple of weeks to keep the dust away; for him, too, it's an emblem of stability, routine, predictability. A lighthouse is a sign of civilisation, both literally and symbolically.

The novel touches upon the original Aboriginal inhabitants, and the idea that 'they walk no more upon this isle'. Now and again Pete - a descendent himself - hears typical racist comments, usually along the lines of Aboriginals getting government handouts once they claim ancestry. It isn't a central topic, more of a complimentary theme: the Aboriginals too, like Essie, have been displaced, dispossessed, no longer - often - have a place they can properly 'belong' to. Here in Tasmania, we have been taught for so long that all the Tasmanian Aboriginals were wiped out, that Truganini was the last Aboriginal, full stop. And so, when we started rewriting that 'fact', acknowledging all the descendants, many people refused to shift their thinking and view these people with great suspicion. We're no less racist here in Tassie than on the mainland, when it comes to the Indigenous population. It was a soft, complementary touch on the part of Wood, a lecturer in English at the University of Tasmania, to include them - part of me wanted it to be more prominent, to matter more, because I love stories about Indigenous issues etc. and learning from them - but I have to also acknowledge that having it as a shadow (again, that 'light and dark' theme) worked quite beautifully. After all, it is Essie's story, a colonial story, first and foremost. The Aboriginal story is part of it, a dark part, but not the whole of it.

The theme of place, and belonging, was strong here. When Essie goes to Scotland with David, prior to the 'present day' events of the novel, she has a moment I could completely identify with:

Essie is separated from [Alva] by time, but in space, she is intimately close, patrolling her walls, stepping through them like a ghost. It makes her feel giddy. She has to sit down on the cold stone, drop her head between her knees to stop herself from fainting.
[...]
She had felt it another time, too. In Scotland. She had gone with David to a conference in Glasgow. On the way, they had stopped in the city of Edinburgh and walked the steep streets up out of the cavity of the railway station into the city, dense and blackened with age. She looked down and there, carved squarely into the paving stone beneath her feet, was the inscription:

This is my own, my native land.
--Walter Scott

Essie had needed to reach out to David to stop herself from falling in the Alice-hole that opened up there in the pavement, a core cut through centuries of Picts, Celts, Angles, Norsemen, all the way to infinity. Imagine that kind of belonging, she had said to David, breathless. He had not understood. [p.72]

I have felt that, and you have to love it when some surprising little detail in a novel leaps out at you like that and instantly connects you to a character. I tried to articulate it in a post I wrote late last year, on Tassie's colonial past and our persevering connection to it - why we love our old heritage buildings, etc. I think Essie captured it well. It's based around a shared culture, which is also why there's a disconnect between us (speaking as a white descendent of British settlers etc.), and the Aboriginals. I have lately been looking at prominent landmarks (since so much else has been changed, disfigured or removed altogether), like mountains and rivers, and trying to imagine Aboriginals there, back before we arrived. It is hard, though. It is so much easier to feel connected - to feel the absence of time within a place - when visiting a colonial heritage site, for instance.

The one thing I disliked, or that irked me, with The Alphabet..., was the use of present tense in the Essie and Pete chapters. It didn't seem like a good fit, it felt a bit stilted and awkward, even when the actual phrases, imagery and language was beautiful, and resonated. But then, the use of present tense has become a real fad in the last, oh, five or so years? and I'm completely and thoroughly sick of it. It's also not a very good tense to use - it's limiting, it's tricky to get right, and it often has the opposite effect from the intended one (it's primary use in fiction is to remove a sense of time, to make the story feel present and the ending unpredictable - for example, theoretically, if you have a first-person narrator and you use present tense, you could kill the character off, something that is illogical when using past tense). Past tense is a stronger, more versatile tense to use, and can achieve the same effect of timelessness and being 'in the now' that present tense should. This book pre-dates the fad, and uses it in a literary sense, but it's an ambitious tense for a first novel. It altered the tone, kept me at a distance I didn't feel was necessary, and, to me anyway, didn't achieve the desired effect.

That is my only real complaint. Otherwise, this is a truly beautiful book, full of rich description, a vivid sense of the past, and characters who felt alive. The atmosphere is imbued with this sense of a Tasmanian Gothic - a sense I'm grateful to have a name for, now. It is a story in which characters 'find themselves' by facing the past: a classic formula, because there's so much truth in it. As Charlie, Essie's grandfather, insists, 'the way things are now rested on the way things were.' [p.55] In order to understand what is, you have to understand what was. Essie's obsession with Alva provides her with a way to handle her own feelings about her parents and grandparents, the animosity between her father and Charlie, her mother's death. And Pete.

As I write this, I'm almost overcome with an urge to re-read the novel, right now. That doesn't happen very often. This is a story about stories, a story about connections across place and time, a story about finding your place in the world - and how you never really stop looking for it. A wonderful glimpse into the colonial past within the natural beauty of the Tasmanian coast, I highly recommend The Alphabet of Light and Dark.

[Marianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Jennifer (JC-S) · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Thirty-nine he was when he went to the lighthouse. Not a great age by any means, but he already had the look of an old man.’

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

[Chris Waterford · Rating 2 out of 5]

I engaged quickly with this book---I loved the descriptive writing---and it had a good beginning. However it seemed all downhill from there. There were three or four different narrators including the author's great-great-grandfather (whose life the novel is partly based on) and a folk tale. I found it quite confusing and the main story somewhat insipid.
5/10

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

I imagine that this novel was written carefully, lovingly, even laboriously. But the breathy, lengthy descriptions of landscapes and the rather vague interior experiences of the rather vague main characters... didn’t engage me emotionally. At ALL.

And so, to me, the careful writing seemed twee, precious. Nebulous. And why did Pete and Essie feel the way they felt? Why did they do the things they did? What was I supposed to feel?

What am I supposed to take away from this carefully written book - which I have just finished but am already starting to forget?

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh dear - loved her short stories but found this really tedious! Perhaps shouldn't have read it at such a busy time - just didn't have the patience for the swapping between the many characters, past and present. All a bit disjointed.

[Pegaunimoose · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
Writing was gorgeous but it unfortunately got boring. Did not care at all about her past sorry. And didn’t really like her to begin with. Pete was ok but I wanted some romance!! Very atmospheric tho

[Lady Demelza · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book while I was living in Tasmania, and somehow of all the novels I've read that are set in Tasmania, this is the one that seems to capture the truth and the flavour of my experience of the island.
I absolutely adore this book. Whenever I come across a second-hand copy, I buy it just so I can give it to the next person that I find who hasn't read it yet. To me, the words are crafted as perfectly as if the author were building a sculpture, a beautiful sculpture with stunningly fine details. She places words in structures like a painter creates form from colour. This isn't just a story, it's a literary work of art.
I particularly admire the author for managing to convey something of the truth of the attempted genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. So few people, it seems, know very much about what happened to the indigenous people of Tasmania once the Europeans settled. I'm so glad she is finding a way to get the word out - it really was this terrible.

[Marie France · Rating 1 out of 5]

A cherished gift but I have grown very wary indeed of 'literary awards' I'm afraid and this read only confirmed what I feared. There are good story threads in this book, some great writing but unfortunately, the 'literary' approach fucks it up.
Jumping from era to era, endless, vapid descriptions, unfinished threads (or at least too vague)destroy a potentially decent tale. Not for me.
Contentwise: Bruny Island off Tasmania, lighthouses, personal loss, existential loneliness (lots), the fear to love again, hurt/bruised people and lots of anecdotes.

[Maliththa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read only the first few chapters. Too vague and disjointed for my liking.
Maybe because I’m trying it during an unsettled time. Anyway, don’t have the energy of youth to persevere.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a first novel and it won the Australian/Vogel Literary Award. I read it when it first came out and enjoyed it but had forgotten the contents. 20 years later, and possibly with a more jaundiced eye, I was disappointed. Wood has been praised for her lyrical style, but I found it overdone, as might be expected from a PhD in creative writing in her first novel. It is based in part on her great-great grandfather Captain William Hawkins who was Superintendent of the Cape Bruny Lightstation, which provides the ancestral theme, but that is just the starting platform. The protagonist Essie identifies herself in parallel narrations with her great aunt Alva, the lighthouse keeper’s strange daughter, told in roman and italics respectively. Essie is spending a term as guardian of the lighthouse which her g-g-grandfather once staffed, while nearby is the house in which Essie was brought up and now her childhood friend Pete is now in residence. All a bit happenstance. Interspersed are fables, appearances by other ancestors, and much jumping around so that it is sometimes hard to follow. Wood explores all sorts of alleys and detailed description, some of which are distracting, others especially describing the sea and natural formation are quite brilliant. We are left to guess at what happened between Pete and Essie in their childhood, and quite why she behaved the way she did: sudden panics, deep expectations that go beyond love, imbuing trivial events heavy with meaning. It is a creative writer’s book, not so much a reader-friendly book.

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book about 6 months ago. I’ve forgotten the main characters names but haven’t forgotten the storylines, the image of the island, or the characters and their struggles with the light and the dark of life. I love the ocean in all its weathers and felt like I was in the water at times. Beautifully written. Felt like a redemption for the ‘living’ characters. Loved it!

[Fernanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

She brought home a pamphlet about getting tatts removed. In all the 'after' pictures there were still blurred shapes and upraised welts of damaged skin. That was the thing about trying to erase the past; no matter what you did, there were always marks.

[Kait · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deeply rooted in history, place, identity, and belonging. Beautiful and thoughtfully made. A delicious treat to read something so lovingly placed in my home. And what a love story - in every sense. I will read this again.

[Jon Clay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't know what to expect (well, I sorta did, being labelled as a Tasmanian Gothic novel), but I really enjoyed this book. There's something to it that I can't put my finger on but love. Brilliant stuff.

[Betty · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is some lovely writing in this novel, but I found it to be quite disjointed, and the characters at times were unconvincing.

[Kelly]

fantastic book, beautiful imagery. The book really evoked growing up in tasmania. Loved the themes, particularly the idea that stories can be told in many ways and there are many takes on the "truth"

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tricky reading. Enjoyed the story in the present, but got bored with the story in the past that was interwoven in it - to tell the truth it lost me a bit. Not a lot in the characters that I liked and was frustrated by the way they engaged with each other.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The writing is so lyrical it's almost like reading an epic poem.

[Kate]

Met Danielle and was curious about the book, loved the imagery and choice of vocabulary, painted pictures of familiar places, nice quick read.

[Natalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haunting. Moved slowly at times, but a lyrical read. Themes of childhood sadness never forgotten, loneliness, hope. I wish she would write another.

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found it difficult to feel empathy with two of the three characters. I felt that they lacked depth and credibility.

[Oanh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful : lyrical and evocative, and I think I'll go live on an island all alone now.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this with my book group. Love Tassie authors!

[Amber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dark, and different. But a compelling read.

[Barbs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Almost poetic. A lovely book.