Customer Reviews

Changing Light: A Novel

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Nora Gallagher's debut novel was a great pleasure to read. Written with the precision of poetry, but with a novel's heft, momentum, and narrative complexity, Changing Light drew me into its vivid New Mexico landscape and launched me on a journey that I found intellectually and emotionally absorbing every step of the way. What sets this book apart from so many other contemporary novels is both its witness to beauty (of nature, of art, of well-chosen words) and its depth of moral imagination. The novel's pages are lit up by an authorial intelligence that is both compassionate and unflinchingly clear. A wonderful love story and a luminous, nuanced portrayal of moral decision-making.

The theme that runs through Changing Light is responsibilty--our ever-widening circle of obligations to be truthful and respectful to ourselves, those we love, the wider net of people we reach, and the world at large. Although centered in Los Alamos during the making of the atomic bomb, the story is deftly woven of movements back and forth through time and place. The main characters--an artist, a scientist working on and then fleeing the Manhattan project, a priest (a woman and two men, respectively) attempt to grasp the nature of their commitments to self and others through the personal and social roles they're being called to play. The author's delicate touch leads us to understand that there are no pat answers or guidebooks to living a truly human--that is to say, moral and connected--life. This is delicate territory both in real life and for a novelist to negotiate. Through their honest and difficult struggle, the characters at last achieve a sense of gentle illumination and balance that reaches the reader as well.

"Changing Light" by Nora Gallagher was a delightfully surprising debut novel--a richly satisfying story, artfully and lyrically told, with profound emotional and intellectual overtones. Tangentially, this is a love story. But more directly, it tells the tales of different life-changing moral dilemmas that three characters must resolve as their lives intertwine during the spring and summer of 1945 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

At the center are two polar opposites: Eleanor Garrigue and Leo Kavan--an artist and a nuclear physicist. Off to the side and pulling each of the other two main characters into a curious triangle is Bill Taylor, the local priest. Eleanor is a woman who has temporarily fled an over-bearing husband and promising art career in New York City to find personal freedom and artistic inspiration living in the solitude and grandeur of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains just over the hill from Los Alamos. Leo Kavan is a world-renowned Czechoslovakian physicist who is brought to Los Alamos by the United States government to work as a top scientist on the Manhattan Project developing the first atomic bomb. As the local Episcopal priest, Bill Taylor is duty-bound to be Eleanor's spiritual confessor and advisor, but he is also strongly attracted to her as a woman.

This is a short novel. Gallagher does not waste time developing each main character completely as an author would have to do if this were nothing more than a love story. She gives us just enough information so that the reader feels comfortable filling in the rest. Gallagher expects intelligent readers--readers who are happy to participate in the storytelling by creating their own plausible back-stories and plot resolutions from tidbits of information thrown in to the text to spark the imagination. Don't we all do exactly this in real life whenever we meet someone new? This technique helps focus the reader's attention away from the love story, toward the true purpose of the work. But don't get me wrong--the love story here is completely believable, satisfying, mature, and enchanting--it is just not the focus of this book.

The "changing light" at the core of this novel is more than merely the beautiful artistic light that saturates the Los Alamos countryside, providing Eleanor with inspiration for her paintings. Gallagher wants us to focus on the far subtler inner light--the guiding moral compass--at the core of each character's being that changes during the course of the novel. Thus the title is apt and points toward the message of the work as a whole.

I look forward to reading more novels by this talented author.

The development of the atomic bomb, inside the secret labratories set up in the New Mexico desert during World War II is the background for a fascinating story of the way the lives of an artist, a scientist, and a priest all intersect. At the end of the novel, the scientist Leo Kavan, a neutron physicist, wonders about words like privilege, destiny and faith, but that's because his life has been touched by the love an artist, Eleanor Garrigue, who's escape into the solitary life of an artist is interrupted by the strange man she finds in a ditch near her home. That man, delirious, and near death, turns out to be a brilliant scientist, who was facing a moral dilemna much larger than the scientific challenge that brought him to the desert and that secret lab. As the story unfolds the secrets of many are brought to the light, while they also struggle to hide from each other. This is a novel which has subtle transitions as each of the major characters confronts hard and difficult truths about their lives, not seeing in the gradual light given to the reader, of the way their lives are starting to merge together in what truly is a kind of changing light.

I think this novel is important and special on at least three levels which involve science, art, and religion. The author, Nora Gallagher, brings just enough of the science involved in the development of the atomic bomb to the pages of this story, but she doesn't wander off into so many details that the reader loses sight of the main story. There is also a kind of restraint shown in letting some of the other major figures from this period, such as Einstein make brief, but almost tangelial appearances. The world of artists struggling for recognition is also present, but once again as a backdrop to this unfolding story. Finally, the element of religious faith and commitment is also present, but more like a thread that is also woven into the background. The themes of scientific exploration, artistic temperment, and religious sentiments are moving in and out of focus, but never to the detriment of the story itself.

I found this story really hard to put down, and even now a few weeks after reading it, I find myself thinking about the main characters. I'm also wondering what the movie version of this novel will be like. I suspect that many reviewers at that time will be talking about what an important topic this book raises. In the end each of the main characters are facing the kinds of moral issues related to the meaning of life and love known to each of us.

This is a great novel. We can only hope that the author, Nora Gallagher, is working on her next book.

Although this beautifully written first novel is billed as a love story, it is so much more than that. The spiritual questioning which is central to Nora Gallagher's two non fiction memoirs infuses this novel, as do overarching questions of right versus wrong (applicable to today's world). Add lyrical descriptions of the New Mexico landscape and characters which you care about and suspense which keeps you turning the pages, and it's a winning package. You even become educated (just enough) about what exactly was going on in Los Alamos in 1945, and what that felt and looked like.

Beautifully written and a page turner, Nora Gallagher's first novel is something to shout about. A love story that raises our awareness of the period when the bomb was developed at Los Alamos, it also raises important moral questions without being heavy handed. You will be immersed in the story, the love, the intrigue and the locale before you realize you are also pondering weighty moral and political questions that have resonance for all of us in today's world.

Gallagher's first novel is not only a fine love story. It is truly craftswomanlike, in the construction of an intricate plot with many characters, many scenes, much detailed research, and elements of mystery and suspense throughout. Gallagher has taken the episodic technique of her memoirs and skillfully transformed it into a complicated and coherent and lucid (not to mention luminous) whole.

Nora Gallagher helps us to see. In her tender and truthful light, scientists are both destroyers and lovers, priests petty and profound, artists altruistic and vengeful, endangered loved ones a source of strength and cause for despair. At a time when the world's brightest scheme weapons of infinite darkness, Gallagher unveils how each player involved flickers and fades with both light and shadow. Indeed, in her changing light, Gallagher crafts characters who mirror us. Such seeing can bring violence to pause.

I heard Nora Gallagher read from her book at EDS in Cambridge last night, and I was in awe as she related her interest in this topic, her personal experience living so close to the making of the bomb as a child and it's affect on her then and now. Her study of the facts have been brought to new life and wonder as she tells the tale of people that actually lived during this awful period of time, and how they were affected. This is a must read for people who appreciate Nora's cadence and style.

My recommendation: If you see this at a used book sale, pick it up. This isn't a book that will change your life, but is a book that will provide hours of enjoyable reading, with moments of real beauty. Why I like this book: 1. It's always fun to see historical figures (in this case, Einstein and physicists who invented the atomic bomb); 2. The descriptions through one of the main character's -- Eleanor's -- eyes are beautiful, told through her sensibility as an artist, and 3. The book has a few twists and a narrative structure (moves back and forth in time), that kept my mind busy as I read. -- Michelle