Luke Campbell’s fractured self comes alive in marvelously sustained dialogue, the “slagging” vulgarity that constitutes the verbal shield under which his squad operates amid the ambushes, the haze of marijuana, and the deceits of the Afghan war-and again after the return home, in his fractious exchanges with uncomprehending civilians. His male protagonist is a soldier, an officer committed to his men if not to his mission. O’Hagan offers a conditional hope mediated by the memory of a life lived before. There is dignity in that faltering consciousness.
In Anne we see what a visitor to any loved one in a nursing home witnesses-the pieces of a former whole, the furtive self-glimpses of a mind confused by its own reflection. O’Hagan takes on our fear of the blank of demented senescence. The third-person narrations in The Illuminations offer us a poignant view of the failing Anne, who is portrayed through fragmented speech and in carefully observed gestures and facial movements. In prior novels he has impersonated Marilyn Monroe’s dog ( in The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of his Friend Marilyn Monroe), and a pederast priest in Be Near Me, a work that renders the complexities of the priest’s career without exonerating or condemning him. Their self-recognitions, both respectively and jointly, shape the climax of the novel’s plot hence the title, The Illuminations, the name of the grand lighting-up of the English seaside resort of Blackpool. Anne Quirk resides in a nursing home on the Scottish coast, west of Glasgow, while Luke Campbell, her grandson, soldiers for a Scottish regiment in Afghanistan. O’Hagan studies twinned souls and fates separated by two generations and considerable family discord. This theme works its way ever so deftly through the parallel developments of two characters in Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel The Illuminations, serving both as an analysis of mental experience and as a structuring principle of the narrative. True personality floats beneath surface consciousness, obscured by the fog of dementia-or the fog of war-and to meet what one truly is can either affirm or destroy.
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