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After reading The Retreat I check out if the Library had any of Alison’s other novels, of which The Lighthouse is her debut.
The blurb on the back of The Retreat referred to “Moore’s trademark compelling unease” and it is evident in spades here – there is an intertwining of plots, with Futh and Ester being the central characters, who are barely acquaintances and yet their fates crash together.
There is a lot of unhappiness, none of the people we encounter are living their best life – but it is mostly the ordinary mundane unhappiness, of divorce, of loveless marriage, of loneliness, and it is perhaps that ordinariness that is the skill and the power – to build tension without anything “dramatic” happening – and then to leave the final scene unwritten yet vivid in our minds it lingers longer in our minds.
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