“He was introspective, insufficiently aware, Angela often said, of other people and how they might see things.” Moore can’t be more explicit than this, and if The Lighthouse has a principal weakness it is this reliance on a certain heaviness of interpretation.įuth’s work is in manufacturing scents – including, for example, instant “coffee whose volatile aromas have been lost and then replaced during the manufacturing process coffee to which the smell of coffee has been added”. On a German walking holiday following the breakdown of his marriage, Futh’s recollections churn around the things said about him first by his distant, philandering father and then his frustrated, disappointed spouse, Angela. The question was doubly elementary because the novel is so open about Futh’s essential emptiness. Futh is meant to elicit the same response in the reader as he does in his wife-to-be when they first meet again a decade or so after attending the same school: “I don’t remember you.” This, Moore was forced to answer, is precisely, er, the point.

In the way of these sessions, opening to questions felt less useful than letting the authors keep talking: at one point, for example, Alison Moore was asked why she had chosen ‘Futh’ as the name of her protagonist in The Lighthouse, since it is a proper noun almost entirely without resonance. I attended the Cheltenham Literary Festival’s annual Booker event yesterday lunchtime, attended by four of the six shortlisted authors, minus Hilary Mantel and Will Self.

The lighthouse novel alison moore