The Promise of Light: A Novel [Paperback]

Paul Watkins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 4, 2000

It is 1921, and young Ben Sheridan's Irish-American father mysteriously dies in their small Rhode Island town. Determined to learn the truth about his family's cloudy past, he sets sail for Ireland, and quickly becomes involved in a struggle between soldiers of the newly formed Irish Republican Army and the brutal British troops. Amidst the lush and rugged Irish countryside, and the horrible violence unfolding across it, Ben must search for the truth of his identity, and the ties of his family's blood.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Further confirming his literary talent, versatility and skill for adventure writing of a high order, Watkins ( In the Blue Light of African Dreams ) shows a mature grasp of his craft in this stunning odyssey of a young man's coming-of-age under brutal circumstances. In 1921, flush with his new job as a banker, young Ben Sheridan returns to his home on Jamestown Island off Rhode Island in time to see a spectacular conflagration in which his father, the island's fire chief, is injured. A routine blood transfusion results in tragedy: his father is poisoned by Ben's blood, and dies leaving a mysterious message and indisputable evidence that Ben is not his real child. With the help of the parish priest, Ben goes to Ireland to try to solve the riddle of his real paternity. From the moment he arrives in the country village of Lahinch he is thrust into the merciless battle between the IRA forces and the British Tans, a bloody war of attrition that leads to a series of suspenseful confrontations in which Ben is involved. Though at first he feels trapped, Ben soon realizes that he is bound by loyalty and by ironic circumstance to these hard-pressed, desperate people. Watkins spins his beautifully researched story in compact, tensile and metaphorically charged prose, vivid with images that tie the protagonist's psychological perceptions with the natural world. The portrayal of the brutal realities of the Irish fight for independence is unflinchingly honest and powerful, electrified by scenes of hand-to-hand combat whose veracity leaps from the page through small details and psychological insights. The behavior of ordinary villagers--some turned secret, heroic soldiers, some cooperating with the enemy--is underscored both by the futility of the long struggle and by its necessity. The only flaw in this remarkable novel is a series of scenes in Rhode Island at the time of Ben's father's death. Here the plotting and the dialogue ring false--a curious lapse in an otherwise impeccable narrative. The reader is urged to read those 50-odd pages with a suspension of judgment; once they are past, the novel hurtles along with jolting surprises and a breathtaking immediacy.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From School Library Journal

YA-- In 1921, Ben Sheridan graduates from college with the promise of a comfortable future as a New England banker, but a different fate awaits him. When his widowed father is seriously injured, a blood transfusion from Ben poisons the man, revealing that Arthur Sheridan is not his biological father. This knowledge, plus a promise to spread Arthur's ashes in his Irish homeland, plunges Ben into a complex, political struggle. He fears that he will never leave Ireland alive, let alone discover the identity of his natural father, who obviously is a critical leader in the IRA. The simple, bold style sliced with frequent, sharp metaphors cuts through any naive or idealistic conceptions readers might have about the effects of civil war. Flesh-and-blood people on both sides are afraid, driven, and engulfed. Watkins provides a powerfully maturing step into a few days of war that promises to last much longer for Ben Sheridan and in the memory of readers.
- Jessica Lahr, Edison High School, Fairfax County, VA
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Picador; 2nd edition (November 4, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312267665
• ISBN-13: 978-0312267667
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,607,825 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding young author, October 13, 2000

By 

Orrin C. Judd "brothersjudddotcom" (Hanover, NH USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Promise of Light: A Novel (Paperback)

Paul Watkins is not just the best young writer we have, he may well be our best living writer, period. His first book, Night Over Day Over Night, published when he was just 23, was nominated for the Booker Prize. Since then he has added a series of excellent novels and one brilliant memoir, Stand Before Your God, that have earned him the reputation of a modern Hemingway or Conrad. His work certainly warrants these lofty comparisons and his omission from Granta's Twenty Best Writers Under Forty casts a shadow on the whole list.

Promise of Light opens, in 1921, with Ben Sheridan taking a ferry back to his home in Jamestown, Rhode Island. He has just secured a long sought job in a bank and his whole future seems open before him. But by the end of the night, his fireman father will lie dead as the result of a blood transfusion from Ben, which reveals that Ben was not his son. In fulfillment of his "father's" dying wish, Ben takes his ashes back to Ireland, where he hopes to discover his real parents. But before he even reaches land, he is embroiled in the bloody Irish Rebellion, as it turns out that his father was a legendary IRA gunrunner who, like a figure out of myth, was expected to return one day.

Watkins brilliantly combines Ben's search for his true identity with rousing action sequences, indeed the final fifty pages of the book depict a running battle between Ben's band of IRA gunmen and the dread English Black and Tans as they race to the farmhouse where the man Ben now believes to be his father is holed up.

The comparisons of Watkins and Hemingway are based on both the settings of his novels (in wartime, on fishing boats, in Africa) and the clarity of his prose. Here he describes Ben's reaction to the death, in battle, of a lobsterman named Tarbox:

I knelt with the others, dew soaking through my trousers, and I tried to remember a prayer. But nothing came to mind, not even a song. All I could think of were Tarbox's bright-painted crab-pot floats, bobbing in the water off Lahinch. And now Mrs. Fuller's words sank into me, about whole generations dying out. I saw how it would be. Tarbox's wife would move away and their tin-roofed shack would fold back into the earth. There would be no children to inherit the land and keep the name alive. The faint scratches that Tarbox had left on the earth would be rubbed out by a year or two of wind and rain.

I had not liked him much. If he had lived and I'd gone back home again, I would not have remembered him kindly. But now I cried for Tarbox and for his wife, because I had been jealous of how much they were in love.

The reasons for comparison to Conrad are evident in his description of the brutal fanatic leader of the IRA cell that Ben joins up with:

I couldn't imagine a childhood for Clayton. I couldn't imagine him younger or older or any way except the way he was now. To me, Clayton had begun to make sense. He didn't try, like the others, to live as if the war could be forgotten from time to time in the dark-paneled walls of Gisby's pub or in front of a fire at night. Clayton lived in black and white. He saw no boundary to violence. The war never quit and his instincts for war never rested. he had no other instincts. Everything else had been put away in a warehouse in his mind. he claimed no friends or love of family because he could be hurt by people who hurt them.

Such are the men that Conrad warned us of, time and again.

The other thing that makes Watkins' work exceptional, is a moral core which seems increasingly rare in our society, never mind in our literature and culture in general. His characters recognize that their actions have consequences and behave as if they cared about those consequences. They are capable of making ethical judgments--a quality that seems to be disappearing elsewhere.

I urge anyone who is not familiar with the work of this great young author to remedy that situation post haste.

GRADE: A+

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I'm no expert, but Paul Watkins may be the best writer alive, January 2, 2002

By 

D. Cooke "[e-mail]" (Macon, GA, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Promise of Light: A Novel (Paperback)

I wasn't really excited about the subject of the book, but I bought it anyway because I've loved everything else that I've read by this author. I could not put it down.
This book is so real, so true, that you feel like these characters might still be alive; like you could meet them and shake their hands and have a conversation with them. And better yet, Watkins gives his characters and stories a moral core, so much so that you start to admire them, forgetting that they are not real people.
Do yourself a favor and find out why so many people consider Paul Watkins to be the greatest writer of his generation. Start with his acclaimed memoir, "Stand Before your God", to find out about his growing up, then move on to his great novels, like this one.

5.0 out of 5 stars Being there, May 5, 2009

By 

Trisha Haddad "Author of "Best of Luck El... (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Promise of Light: A Novel (Paperback)

I agree with the other reviewers that Paul Watkins is possibly our best living author. The research he did for Promise of Light shines through to set the reader in Ireland in the early 1920s (in fact, I think I remember reading that he lived in the town for a while, and would walk in the fields wearing the old boots his characters wore, so he would know exactly how it would feel and sound to be there).

Watkins' strengths are in place and in ruggedly male characters; characters the reader connects with, without feeling all warm and fuzzy about it.

The Promise of Light may be my favorite of Watkins' books, but it is right up there with Stand Before Your God and Archangel... both dealing with subjects I didn't know I was interested in until his writing drew me into them. I whole-heartedly recommend any of these.