47 pages • 1 hour read
M.L. StedmanThe Light Between Oceans
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1
Prologue: “27th April 1926”
Janus Rock is a tiny and remote island, 100 miles east from Australia’s coast; to the west, vast open water stretches all the way to Africa. Tom, who tends the lighthouse, and Isabelle, his wife, are the island’s only residents.
One day, a dinghy washes ashore. In the boat are a dead man and an infant, who is still alive. Isabel tends to the baby and is immediately taken with her. The reader can infer from Tom and Isabel’s conversation that they have tried unsuccessfully to have children of their own. Isabel persuades to Tom to wait until morning to report the incident, and against his better judgment, he agrees.
Chapter 1 Summary: “16th December 1918”
Seven years before “the miracle” of the baby’s arrival, Tom, a veteran of World War I, successfully interviews for a job with the Commonwealth Lighthouse Service. Tom accepts a temporary post on Janus Rock while the previous keeper, Trimble Docherty, takes medical leave. Trimble has lost his wife; her death and the inhospitable conditions of the island have caused Trimble to become mentally unstable and unfit to maintain his post.
Tom is haunted by the war, and he suffers from nightmares and struggles to put what he saw and did behind him. Tom, like many men who have come back from the war, carries deep psychological scars. Onboard the ship that will take him to Point Partageuse, Tom can tell at a glance which of the other passengers had been to war. After he steps in to protect a young woman from a drunken soldier, he explains to her that being in the war confuses one’s ability to discern right from wrong.
Chapter 2 Summary
Tom’s ship arrives at Point Partageuse, on the southwest cape of Australia’s mainland. The close-knit community of Partageuse has lost many young men to the war, and those who returned are changed. Janus Rock lies far off the coast of Partageuse and is accessible by boat only four times a year.
Tom stays in Partageuse for a couple days before departing for Janus Rock. During this time he meets Isabel, a local resident whose joyful laugh reminds him that he has resumed normal life. When Isabel arrives with her parents at the harbormaster’s dinner, she hides the fact that she and Tom have already met and teases him secretly throughout the night.
Chapter 3 Summary
On the long journey to Janus on the store boat, the reader learns that Tom earned a Military Cross, a medal for heroism, in the war. However, Tom doesn’t consider himself a hero, pointing out that the men who are most deserving of honor are dead.
Whittnish, a retired keeper who stepped in upon Docherty’s sudden departure, gives Tom a tour of the lighthouse. The lighthouse is particularly beautiful. Soon, Tom is alone on the island, where he feels a stillness inside himself for the first time in years. Nearly sucked into a vortex by the isolation, Tom forces himself to engage with the present moment and his present circumstances.
That evening he lights the lamp of the lighthouse for the first time and makes notes in the log. He is the only person on the island, which is nearly a hundred miles away from civilization.
Prologue-Chapter 3 Analysis
The author develops the book’s unsettled mood using personification to describe Janus Rock: The island appears to be “look[ing] back, fretful, toward the Australian mainland” (13). The rotating light of the lighthouse is “[a]lways turning, always looking over its shoulder” (21). The personification of the island reflects Tom’s own constant state of unease, which the reader begins to understand in these opening chapters. Tom, like Janus Rock, seems to always be looking over his shoulder, expecting to find the memories of war pursuing him.
While other men have come back from the war with a distorted sense of what is right and wrong, Tom holds fast to his moral sensibilities. Through the thoughts and feelings of Tom, the reader is introduced to one of the major themes of the novel: the difference between right and wrong.
The literal isolation of Janus Rock symbolizes Tom’s emotional isolation. His new role as lighthouse keeper offers Tom an opportunity to be far away from people and from his memories of the war. On Janus Rock, Tom can heal and come to terms with his changed nature.
In these early chapters, the theme of loss is introduced. The people of Partageuse are accustomed to grief and loss, and they appear to understand that they are subject to some greater force that gives life and takes life away: “God seemed to sprinkle extra children about, and harvest them according to some indecipherable, divine calendar” (29). The natural rhythms of life and death are like the ebb and flow of the tide.
