The Blackwater Lightship | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 3 pages of analysis & critique of The Blackwater Lightship.

The Blackwater Lightship | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 3 pages of analysis & critique of The Blackwater Lightship.
This section contains 631 words
(approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Review by Martyn Bedford

SOURCE: Bedford, Martyn. “Going Gently.” New Statesman 128, no. 4458 (11 October 1999): 57-8.

In the following review, Bedford asserts that although the prose in The Blackwater Lightship can seem too sterile, the novel is overall “a fine, thoughtful, compassionate” work.

A list of nations where a man might be glad to be gay would stretch a long way down the page before Ireland earned its place. And to be gay and dying of an Aids-related illness in rural Wexford would not be most young men's preferred route of egress from the world. But such is the lot of Declan, the fulcrum of Colm Tóibín's Booker-shortlisted novel [The Blackwater Lightship]. In terminal decline, he asks to be taken from the relative tolerance of modern Dublin to spend his last days at his grandmother's remote cottage on the coast. He insists, too, that his mother, sister and two closest gay friends...

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This section contains 631 words
(approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Review by Martyn Bedford
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Critical Review by Martyn Bedford from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.