SCWC Book Reviewer in Residence: The Last Lighthouse Keeper
REVIEWED BY ANDY MUIR
I’m a sucker for the Maatsuyker Islands, the rugged lumps of rock spat out like broken teeth at the bottom of Tasmania. In fact these isolated islands, blasted by bitter Antarctic winds, are a good metaphor for John Cook, the author of The Last Lighthouse Keeper.
Why are light houses seen as romantic? They’re stark buildings, remote like strangers you meet and can’t quite work out, as their brilliant white surfaces soak up our gothic horrors and mysteries. Yet for sailors at sea, they offer safety and reassurance. No other building is quite like them, and this memoir shines a light on the now lost way of life required to keep them running.
The Last Lighthouse Keeper is about one man’s love affair with the sea. Quickly steering us through the currents of a dislocated and unsettled life, the story settles once Cook joins the Australian Lighthouse Service in the late 1960s. Immediately, Cook falls in love with his new life keeping the lighthouse shining through storms both real and personal. John’s total embrace of this life is completely engaging; there is a strong sense that without the Lighthouse, his story would have involved prisons. As he says, you either find your humanity in the light, or you lose your soul. You wonder where these types of people exist now that lighthouses are automatic and electric with no need for their full-time staff stuck at sea, but never moving.
The first-person linear structure is easy to read even when threatening a dark turn. It took a special, rough, and possibly mad personality to sign up for lighthouse keeping. John Cook has the right flaws, is unwilling to suffer fools, strong willed and fiercely independent, yet this lifestyle threatened his sanity and pushed his relationships to breaking. His partner suffers him, joining him on his adventures, but you sense there will be a point where she will be unable to continue. Several sections hint to darker omitted material such as the prologue where John lies atop a lighthouse howling to his absent children on the Tasmanian mainland, separated from him as much by the ocean as his own life choices. These mistakes affect his relationships and connections with other people, even threatening the vocation he loves so much. This is a man unable to be in the world. His two dogs Stinky and Lucy appear to be the only things keeping him connected to the world, and the moment he saves the life of Lucy is particularly touching. When the local seal colony is threatened by fishermen, you fear how far John will go.
Like the Maatsuyker Islands, this story is about a life few of us will experience. The gruff, awkward manliness, the weather and isolation, the mundane yet crucial nature of the work, is the punctuation to a lost masculine world. Yet the search for purpose and connection is something all of us experience. It is in the romance of these flaws that the book becomes more than just a life lived in a lighthouse.
Thank you to Allen & Unwin for the review copy of The Last Lighthouse Keeper by John Cook with Jon Bauer. You can grab your own copy from Booktopia here.
SCWC 2021 Book Reviewer: Andy Muir
Award nominated screenwriter and story researcher for the hugely successful Underbelly franchise, Andy Muir was nominated for a Ned Kelly for his debut crime fiction Something for Nothing (Affirm Press, 2017). The follow up Hiding to Nothing (Affirm Press, 2019) continues anti hero Lachie Munro’s misadventures. Awarded a 2019 Australian Society of Authors Fellowship, he is currently writing two new crime novels.