The Light Between Oceans is the debut novel, published in 2012, by Australian author M. L. Stedman. It focuses on Tom Sherbourne, returning from the war to work as a lighthouse keeper on a tiny island where he is the sole inhabitant. On a visit to the mainland, he soon falls in love with the beautiful and vivacious Isabel. She moves to the island with him and everything goes quite well until Isabel begins to sink into depression after realizing she is unable to conceive. One day, however, a boat with a baby washes on to the shore and Isabel convinces Tom to not report the incident and to pass the child off as their own. Tom and Isabel are not bad people; they are simply desperate people.
The plot is not a complex one. The characters, on the other hand, are very complex. I find it startling that a debut writer is able to create characters with personalities that are so well-formed and so well-defined. The novel is an intense character study of the people that populate the story, offering real reasons for their motivations, their desires and actions. Perhaps, it is because of the author’s people-centric approach to the work that there does exist moments when the story does not move as fast as one wants it to – but then one realizes that this is not a novel that focuses on thrills and action but, rather, people and emotions.
I find it to be a difficult book to categorize. Is it historical fiction, family drama, war fiction? Stedman manages to straddle together so many different elements to make the work what it is that one of the most remarkable things about the novel is that it does not overwhelm the reader with its myriad of themes: everything from loneliness, prejudice, motherhood, war, etc. Although I have admitted that there are many themes in the novel and categorizing the book is difficult, I do think that the way in which the author manages to weave everything so well together is by infusing a common thread throughout every major incident in the novel so that we end up with a situation where one theme snakes through all the other themes in the book, binding them to each other and giving us the cohesive whole that is The Light Between Oceans. This connecting strand that flows through the entire novel is love.
Tom and Isabel fall for each other so hard that their actions, including their bad moral decisions, for the rest of the story, are justified solely on the depth of their love for each other. Tom agrees to keep the child and goes along with Isabel’s doomed plan because he loves his wife and desires to see her happy. The child’s biological mother never stops looking for her daughter, entering and complicating the story, because she loves her child. On and on it goes, with love as the main factor propelling much of the characters’ decisions in the novel. In the end, if one had to absolutely decide on a genre for this novel, perhaps the best choice would be to simply refer to it as a love story: of love between men and women, and of love between parents and children.