The Promise of Light

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.

It is 1921. Young Ben Sheridan, a job offer from a bank in his pocket, returns home to Jamestown, Rhode Island, to find a fire that threatens the town harbor and an accident that injures fire chief Arthur Sheridan, his father. When Arthur requires a blood transfusion, Ben provides it, only to have his father die of blood poisoning. Ben is shocked to learn that Arthur Sheridan was not his biological father. The discovery uproots everything Ben thought he knew about his life, and sends him on a journey to Ireland to find the truth about his heritage. The parish priest, Father Willoughby, arranges for his passage to Ireland and letters of introduction to Arthur's old friends. But Ben isn't even off the boat from America before he discovers he has been dropped into the middle of a civil war, one that will force him to make tough choices about the life he left behind in America and the perhaps very short life before him in Ireland. Paul Watkins excells at setting a textured sense of place. "The Promise of Light" brings to life Narragansett Bay in the years between World War I and the Great Depression. His description of Jamestown and its inhabitants is as real as a handful of beach sand. He evokes the Irish Civil War between the British Black and Tans and the Irish Republican Army as the vicious, very local and personal fight it must have been. His protagonist, Ben Sheridan, is startingly real as a troubled young man on a quest for a long hidden truth across an ocean and a tangled battlefield. Watkins' characters are each unique and with surprising depth for a short novel. Dialogue is life-like, spare, and honed to the requirements of the storyline. The storyline itself ebbs and flows, now briskly, now reflectively, towards Ben Sheridan's "promise of light." This novel is highly recommended as an entertaining and atmospheric read, one that shows Watkins as a mature novelist on top of his game.

the story of a boy who is caught between who he is and where he belongs seems to be a theme in every one of watkin's books, however, this one in particular speaks volumes to me. along with the forger, i read this book about once a year.

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.

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, lik