"Photography has without doubt made her a seer; she is a woman of the future, someone leaning into time, beyond others, precarious, unafraid to fall..." This is the story of Lucy Strange, a photographer, while the art is in its infancy, in the 1870s, who exists in an extraordinarily heightened state of seeing and imagining. Her tale is told in sixty illuminated parts - using candlelight, flames, lightning, gas-lamps, mirrors, magic lanterns and, most mysteriously, lit faces and bodies. In a contracted, almost modernist form, Sixty Lights tracks Lucy's life from her childhood in Australia, to her stormy adolescence in England and India and finally to her death in London at the age of twenty-three. It is a life abbreviated, but not a life diminished: she is a remarkable character, forthright, gifted, passionate and canny. Sixty Lights plays powerfully with Victorian tropes and texts - orphans, inheritances, Great Expectations - setting them against the technological revolution in seeing that is inspired by photography. Written with astute imagistic precision, the story is deeply layered, fluctuating between past, present and future. This is an impressive UK debut from a prize-winning
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"'Breathtaking grace and immense skill...engaging, beautiful, magical and compelling' Irish Times"
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
About the Author
Gail Jones teaches in the department of English, Communications and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia. She is the author of short stories and one previous novel which have been published in Australia and for which she has won numerous awards.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Lights ephemeral,
By
This review is from: Sixty Lights. Gail Jones (Paperback)
Lucy Strange and her brother Tom grow up in Melbourne, Australia in the mid 19th century, and are unfortunately orphaned, while just young children. Their uncle takes them to London where they live for a few years until Lucy is persuaded by her uncle, to travel to India to meet an old friend of his, with a view to possible marriage. During the long sea voyage, Lucy is willingly seduced by an older, married man and arrives to tell her prospective husband of her pregnancy. Despite an initial reserve between them, they soon become good, platonic friends, with him promising to support her and to return her to England when the baby is old enough to travel. While in India, Lucy meets one of the early photographers of the day and becomes his pupil, learning the then difficult processes of photography with its accompanying complicated chemical treatments. Upon her return to England, she furthers her studies of the art and discovers that she has contracted tuberculosis while abroad.
The author of this book writes beautiful, lyrical prose, both ethereal and haunting and full of the heroine's fantasy of light and shade, sometimes taking three pages to describe a single scene, while I just wanted to get on with the story. It's a dreamy, floaty kind of book and, if that's what you like, this is for you.
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