The Illuminations

Written by Andrew O'Hagan

Narrated by Cathleen McCarron

Standing one evening at the window of her house by the sea, Anne Quirk sees a rabbit disappearing in the snow. Nobody remembers her now, but this elderly woman was in her youth a pioneer of British documentary photography. Only when her beloved grandson, Luke, returns home to Scotland does Anne's secret story begin to emerge, along with his, and they set out for an old guest house in Blackpool where she once kept a room.

• Language: English
• Publisher: W. F. Howes Audio
• Release date: Sep 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781510003835

Andrew O'Hagan

Andrew O’Hagan is one of Britain’s most exciting and serious contemporary writers. He has twice been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. He was voted one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. He has won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the author of Our Fathers, Be Near Me, The Illuminations, among other books. He lives in London.

Reviews for The Illuminations

[gayla.bassham · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I never know what to say about books I really love. Everything sounds so repetitive -- the writing was beautiful, the characters felt real, the themes resonated. It's all true, but it sounds trite. For me, this was the right book at the right time, and I am grateful to have read it when I did.

[stephengoldenberg · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a book about memories - real ones and false ones. It follows two main characters - Anne Quirk, an elderly woman living in sheltered housing and suffering from Alzheimer's, and her grandson, Luke, an army captain serving in Afghanistan. The novel is full of clever metaphors and illusions to the past and to people's memories and histories, not least the illuminations themselves - Blackpool's - and the seaside town itself plays a major role.
In addition, Anne's past as a talented photographer is constantly alluded to and shows the powerful role that photographs play in our memories.
For most of the book, O'Hagan alternates between chapters featuring Anne's life in her sheltered housing block and the very much grittier sections featuring Luke's experiences in Afghanistan. What shines through is the author's wholehearted sympathy for all his characters.

[sparemethecensor · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I finished The Illuminations today. A beautifully written and enjoyable read, but it doesn't strike me as a very memorable novel.

[joyhclark · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a beautiful, intertwining story of a woman and her grandson. One is regressing to the past as dementia takes hold, while the other is attempting to move into the future after his military mission goes awry, resulting in tragedy. At the center is a moving commentary on how we cope with tragedy.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a story about families, and how those connections shape us, and how we aren't always our best selves when we're with our families. The novel tells the story of Anne Quick, an elderly woman who will have to soon move from her sheltered accommodation into a nursing home, despite the efforts of the residence's warden and a neighbor who keeps a close and caring eye on her, fascinated by Anne's career as a professional photographer in New York. It's a far different life than that of retired women living in a small seaside town near Glasgow. But the novel is also about Maureen, a woman who is caring and diligent when she's with Anne, but despite her best intentions, difficult and tense around her own children and grandchildren. And it's about Luke Campbell, Anne's grandson, who is serving in the military in Afghanistan and watching his commanding officer fall apart. As the threads of the relationships draw them together, Luke wants to take Anne on one final trip to her beloved Blackpool, to see the famous illuminations one last time.This is one of those deceptively quiet novels, revolving as it does around the memories of an elderly woman, but that stillness hides a powerful story of war and how we shape our stories. The Illuminations very much deserves its place on the Booker longlist. The writing and the intricate shape of the story are both very fine.

[jhullie-3 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I’m not too sure how I feel about this book. I liked it, it felt a bit like I was meandering through someone else’s memories, which I suppose was the point. I did keep waiting for something momentous to happen though, and it never did.

[gypsysmom_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I heard about this book when it was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015. Otherwise I don't think it has gotten much press and I am rather surprised because I thought it was well-written and poignant. It did not make the Booker shortlist and the book that won, A Brief History of Seven Killings, was outstanding so I'm not surprised it didn't win but it still should have made more of a splash I think. It also made me aware of pioneering Canadian photographer Margaret Watkins, a woman who turned ordinary scenes into works of art. Check out her picture of dishes in a sink.Anne Quirk is in her eighties and living in a retirees home in Scotland. A groundbreaking photographer when she was young, she is now slipping into dementia. Her neighbour, Maureen, and the warden have taped off the burners on her stove and keep a close eye on her but she soon will have to move to a personal care facility. Anne has a daughter and a grandson. She has never been close with her daughter but she has a very good relationship with her grandson, Luke. Luke is a captain in the army and is fighting in Afghanistan as the book opens. The things he sees and is involved in there cause him to leave the army. Rather at loose ends he decides to take his grandmother to Blackpool, a place where she was happy with her daughter's father. Anne is happy to be back in Blackpool and Luke finds some peace from his own demons.The chapters set in Afghanistan are gritty and violent but a mesmerizing account of warfare. O'Hagan gives thanks to some Afghanis and soldiers at the end of the book but he doesn't say if he was ever there. However I did find a piece he wrote about orphans in Afghanistan so I am sure he used that experience to underpin his writing. And the chapters that focus on Anne are just as realistic. Very worthwhile.

[icolford · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In Andrew O’Hagan’s poignant novel The Illuminations, Anne Quirk’s mind is slowly unraveling. Anne, in her eighties, is living in a sheltered housing development in Saltcoats, North Ayrshire in Scotland, closely watched over by her sometimes meddlesome but well-meaning neighbour Maureen, and, more distantly, her daughter Alice. Sadly Anne’s time at Lochranza Court is coming to an end: it’s becoming clear to those around her that she’s declining, losing her grip on the present and no longer capable of living semi-independently. In the meantime, her grandson Luke, a captain with the Royal Western Fusiliers, is completing a tour of duty in Afghanistan. When his mission goes horribly wrong, Luke returns home and tries to forget the tragic events he witnessed along with his own fatal error in judgment that contributed to the mission’s disastrous conclusion. Luke and Anne have a bond, one that goes beyond simple mutual affection engendered by common blood: Anne passed her love of the visual arts to Luke. In her youth, Anne was a documentary photographer whose work, had it become widely known, would have likely led to an international career and widespread acclaim. But instead of pursuing her passion, she allowed a man’s betrayal to crush her spirit. At the crux of her memories is Harry, the man who taught her the art of photography and broke her heart. Her memories are fixated on Blackpool, the English resort town famous for its “illuminations,” an annual lights festival, where Anne kept a studio in a bedsit and where she carried on her affair with Harry, until he stopped meeting her. When the time comes for his grandmother to be moved into a nursing home, Luke takes Anne to Blackpool, where she can revisit her past with dignity, and Luke can redouble his efforts to forget. The Illuminations, a profoundly human novel that often triggers an emotional response, is also one that never descends into sentiment. O’Hagan, a disciplined fiction writer and journalist, knows how to move a story forward. His exploration of memory, loss and family secrets is wise and moving.

[rab1953-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Curiously, this book raises many questions similar to those of the last one I read (Little Bastards in Springtime, also published in 2015, and with a cover image that uses the same form). It deals with the stories that we tell ourselves about war and about living our lives.The contemporary war in this story is the British forces in Afghanistan in the early 2000s. (It was the Bosnian civil war in Little Bastards.) It’s complicated by a separate story in which a woman is losing her memories of her husband in the second world war. Both lines of this novel involve a lot of story-telling.Luke (a Scot) joined the British Army to follow his father who was killed in Ireland, a bit of complicated story telling in itself. He leads a company into an Afghan skirmish that goes badly. He no longer buys the stories (even the cynical ones the soldiers tell themselves), although he does play along with his mates when he meets them later – perhaps in order not to weaken their own faith. Anne’s story is more complicated still. A Canadian photographer who relocated to New York where she trained with Stieglitz, then relocated to England following World War 2, she forms a relationship with a photographer in Blackpool before moving to live in Scotland. She is inspired creatively by him, and has a relationship that leads to a child. Later we find out that the stories he has told her, and that she has told her family and perhaps believes herself, are not entirely true. But by the time of the novel, she is slipping into Alzheimer’s disease, confuses the past and the present, and seems happy to believe the stories that she has been telling everyone. To her, they are the reality, and happier than the life she has led.The two stories come together when Luke, Anne’s grandson, takes her to Blackpool, finds out the reality, and concludes that Anne can live the rest of her life happily in her idealized fantasy. He seems to accept that the stories in his own life might be okay too, if they help people cope. In spite of the interesting themes, and the polished prose in this novel, it didn’t do much for me. I found it too removed and I never felt drawn to the story or the characters. There is a distant, detached tone, and the story itself is just not very interesting. This may just be an idiosyncratic response, because I know the book is well regarded, and was nominated for a Booker prize. There are many good things about the book – O’Hagen has some poetic, precise descriptive language that is quite evocative. And he has a facility for shifting viewpoints around a scene, sometimes showing how two or three people see it within a single paragraph. His descriptions of Luke’s crew in the heat of Afghanistan, not sure who to trust, not knowing what’s ahead, and the sudden reaction when things go wrong, give what seem to be a very realistic picture of a military crew.But all of this, somehow, leaves me unengaged. When I compare it to the reaction I had to Little Bastards, it lacks the emotional response that Jevrem’s story drew out. Possibly young Jevrem is just a more relatable character than the older introspective Luke. And Anne is barely there except as a character that other people relate to, and most of her past seems absent. Perhaps this is the challenge of writing about a character whose past is evaporating. Overall, I found this novel unsatisfying, and I found myself eager to get through it.