On the Lighthouse at the Edge of the World

J. R. Dawson’s The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World was never on my radar. I picked it up at my local library’s recent-releases shelf because I liked the cover and, after reading the jacket, was curious what I’d find. On the surface it’s a plot-driven, dual-perspective narrative about an encounter between two women in the space between worlds, the boundary between life and death — a space embodied here as the physical shore of Lake Michigan, with the story centered on Chicago. It’s a fairly classic, almost archetypal tale that unites traditional Jewish spirituality around death, Greek mythology, a lesbian romance, and the hero’s journey; it’s a combination of the Faust narrative and the legend of Orpheus, except that, unlike those, this one has a redemption arc — the characters aren’t lost, and the story is better oriented toward today’s values.

I found the surface narrative far less compelling than Dawson’s atmospheric language and the thematic depths she submerges us in. The book runs on two main perspectives, with a few short chapters from others, and the two could not be more different. Charlie is a young woman living through the 2000s, in her early twenties, university-aged or just after, and the language of her chapters reflects her — the language of anxiety, of personal independence, of current trends. Nera’s chapters read as though written in the late nineteenth century, with flourishes, though never so many as to distract, and her world is a beautiful, wondrous place to explore. Those two perspectives are fundamental. Charlie is traumatized: she lost her sister in a mass shooting and does everything she can to bring her back, unable to grapple with her grief or to process it, and no one around her can help her do so, so that cynicism and disillusionment color her chapters even as she possesses the miraculous ability to see ghosts. Nera, meanwhile, has been kept like a caged bird by her father, who has spent her whole life trying to protect her from the tragic, horrible circumstances of the living world; born a living human, she has no experience of anything outside the in-between.

Over the course of the story we meet countless ghosts, and “Haunts,” the spirits of the dead unable or unwilling to release their attachment to life, and, as in any ghost story, the characters are metaphors for grief, trauma, and the past that stays with us. The ghostliest character is Harosen, Nera’s father and keeper of the titular lighthouse — a modern Charon, ferrying the dead across the lake to the veil. He’s alive, but he may as well be dead: cold, self-protective, terrified of the outside world, with no memory of his life before he built the lighthouse. We know he came to the shores of Chicago during the Great Fire, but the bulk of what we learn about him comes not from him but from his lover, David. He has a chokehold on the past, it’s so close to him, and yet his memory fails him — by choice. He epitomizes deep trauma: he believes he’s learned the lessons, but he can’t get through them. We meet other ghosts too, like Edna, who reminds Nera to say a prayer as she brings the dead to their next phase. Nera and Charlie might themselves be read as ghosts, though they’re plainly alive: Charlie clings to the past so tightly there’s nothing but past, while Nera has no real history at all. In each case there’s something eerie, in Mark Fisher’s sense; the book plays with presence and absence both aesthetically and thematically.

For all the pain in it, above all Charlie’s, Dawson offers a path through — a way we might process and make sense of our own suffering. Charlie moves forward, with setbacks, but she overcomes them and finds new reasons to live, this time with a deeper understanding of life’s ephemerality: rather than leading only to suffering, the transience of things can empower us to value the small joys of everyday life. Nera’s path is different, but she too learns how to live; she had none of Charlie’s lost pleasures to begin with, and while she doesn’t suffer, she has to learn to appreciate life with no past experience to draw on, hearing of the world’s beauty from those in the lighthouse without much context for it. With her intimate knowledge of death, if not of grief, she’s able to live without the fear of loss — to treasure each moment without gripping it too tightly. There are lessons here for readers like me: we, too, can live this way. We differ from Charlie and Nera in that we have no idea what comes after, but we needn’t fear it. Does a light fear its “off” state while it’s on? Of course not. I find it empowering to believe that death is the process of a drop making its way back to the sea — that it comes with a feeling of wholeness. It’s a horrible process for those left living, who must make sense of profound loss, but we need not fear death itself; we can recognize its presence and live each moment in a way that respects the passage of all things, and, as the Japanese beautify the broken through wabi-sabi, we can find beauty in the ephemeral. The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World treats grief with a tenderness that many readers may need, especially anyone currently mourning. I chose it half by chance, and I’m grateful to have walked through Dawson’s beautiful, broken world alongside such compelling characters. Altogether, an outstanding read.