Written by Tom Carrao
Where are we? This simple question takes on enormous existential weight for the central couple of Miquel Reina’s tender debut novel.
Harold and Mary Rose Grapes are embalmed in profound personal grief when their lives are unmoored completely in one swift move from self-imposed exile. During a tempestuous storm, their precarious cliffside home detaches from its foundations and floats out to sea. Any leap of credibility that a reader will have to make is eased by the reactions of the characters who themselves can scarcely believe the circumstances.
On the eve of eviction from their geographically perilous property, surrounded and beleaguered by the boxed dusty detritus of their lives, any further disruption is unimaginable. Reina skilfully exploits this surreal (or “marvellously real”) aspect to the story to investigate and reveal the long-buried and repressed emotions within the Grapes, the sub-conscious incrementally teased out as the journey unfolds, suggesting that healing (hard and painfully earned) is possible even years on from tragedy.
35 years ago, misjudging the severity of a weather forecast, Mr. Grapes set sail home with his young son, Dylan, only to lose him to the sea after a rogue wave capsizes their boat. At a shipyard on the other side of their island home, the two had been diligently employed constructing a private boat, intended to become the family’s permanent home. The death of the child maroons both parents in a dense fugue of despair and fathomless sadness, compounded by unspoken guilt and recrimination. The hollowed Grapes dismantled what they now perceived as a worthless project and incorporated bits of it in the home they built for themselves at cliff’s edge. Over the years, what may have been intended as shrine to the lost son has atrophied into a mausoleum.
Long-dormant, pure instincts towards survival kick in as the Grapes confront the dire conditions of their plight. Harold and Mary Rose are startled into a direct engagement with the present, awake and fighting after so many years of vacancy both spiritual and psychological.
Harold sets about solving the practicalities of electricity and potable water. Meanwhile, Mary Rose sets about restoring some order in the residence, as all furnishings and objects have shifted violently in the plunge. However, a bit more self-sufficiency and resourcefulness from Mary Rose would be welcome, overall, as behaviour occasionally lapses reductively along traditional gender lines.
It is determined the buoyancy of the property, the reason it has remained intact, is due to the unique volcanic composition of the island’s soil, which has produced a series of air pockets. Mysterious, alluring lights pulse on the horizon when exhaustion and apprehension conspire to defeat the Grapes. These are allusions perhaps to the fireflies beloved of their son or, indeed, solicitous transmissions from his soul now embedded in the universe to encourage their resolve. Reina’s immediacy of style in this section lends a thrilling moment-to-moment awareness of physical and environmental threat as the couple battle against the elements.
After near-disaster, the Grapes are rescued by the inhabitants of a nomadic tribe of people, initially suspicious, but soon compassionate. As the Grapes become enmeshed in the day-to-day activities of the community, opening themselves to cultural rituals and perspectives far from their own, it is suggested that much of an enlightened outlook springs from engagement with and appreciation of difference. When a similar tragedy to the Grapes’s own strikes a family to whom they have grown close, their considered and reflective response stirs the Grapes to confront all the years of bitterness and regret that have made it impossible to purge and move on, that has isolated them comprehensively.
“I must keep moving forward…because in the end that’s why we’re here, right? The only reason we are given life is to live it…life is a constant journey”. No blame is sought, no fault is assigned, just an acknowledged acceptance of the vagaries of existence, and how we decide to continue travelling despite them. A gentle but remorseless rebuke to a couple who abruptly ceased any motion.
With this revelation, the Grapes welcome a peace and comfort thought impossible to access. In these final chapters, Reina in his enthusiasm and delight for his characters’ breakthrough has a tendency to overwrite the dialogue between Mr. And Mrs. Grapes-they reveal themselves to one another in an inelegant overflow of self-actualised effluvium that seems more the result of absorbing the text of a self-help book. This sometimes gross overstatement can be forgiven as Reina has built so much sympathy for the duo through their adversity and hardship. They are certainly due this epiphany, but writing it descriptively would ease what sounds cumbersome and overwrought as conversational confession. This sudden effusion of talk also violates the reserved nature of the Grapes which, even in the face of tensions cracking like “dry, brittle crust”, would not so quickly transition into such loquaciousness.
Readers can already discern, through the simplest expression of behaviour and action, how matters between the Grapes are easing and thawing. The expansion extends right through to the Grapes’s property, as well, which finally shakes off the funereal in favour of vivid momentum-a fulfilment of original intentions. In the concluding segments, when Reina allows his authorial voice to reflect, he achieves some of his most moving, lyrically plain spoken passages.
Sometimes we need to get lost in order to find ourselves, reads an anonymous quote at the start of the tale. And sometimes, when we are quite unable or unwilling to motivate ourselves, the universe will set in place its own strategy. Reina’s strategy is to embody this principle so winningly, fantastically and poignantly in this inaugural work.
Lights On The Sea is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
In this riveting debut, prize-winning artist and filmmaker Miquel Reina maps out ambitious and fantastical new territory in a novel about a couple holding on for dear life as their world takes an extraordinary fall…
On the highest point of an island, in a house clinging to the edge of a cliff, live Mary Rose and Harold Grapes, a retired couple still mourning the death of their son thirty-five years before. Weighed down by decades of grief and memories, the Grapeses have never moved past the tragedy. Then, on the eve of eviction from the most beautiful and dangerously unstable perch in the area, they’re uprooted by a violent storm. The disbelieving Grapeses and their home take a free-fall slide into the whitecapped sea and float away.
As the past that once moored them recedes and disappears, Mary Rose and Harold are delivered from decades of sorrow by the ebb and flow of the waves. Ahead of them, a light shimmers on the horizon, guiding them toward a revelatory and cathartic new engagement with life, and all its wonder.
Wildly imaginative, deeply poignant, and entirely unexpected, Lights on the Sea sweeps readers away on a journey of fate, acceptance, redemption, and survival against the most rewarding of odds.
