Books 2025, 15: To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf

Slightly oddly, I bought this in a bookshop in Canada on our recent trip. I mean, it’s not that odd. Toronto is an English-speaking city, with decent bookshops: why wouldn’t I get it there? Just that it’s not in the least Canadian, and it gave me extra weight to carry home.

But it was such a nice bookshop I wanted to support it (BMV on Queen Street West, if you’re interested), and this is a book I’ve meant to read for years.

Does anyone actually reach the titular maritime safety device/residence? That’s one of the things I wanted to know, as well as what else the story was about. Well, it’s Woolf, so as I wrote about Mrs Dalloway, it’s mainly about the inside of people’s heads.

Not in a gruesome way; not like that thing they do in House, where the camera goes up someone’s nose and into their brain (we’re watching the first season at the moment). I mean their minds, obviously.

Slightly to my surprise, it’s set in Scotland. Specifically, a Hebridean island, generally taken to be Skye, although there’s no lighthouse like the one in the story there. A family with about four (five, six?) children — ranging from young adults about to be married off, down to a boy of five or six — have a holiday home there. and spend the summer, along with various guest they’ve invited along.

Conversations happen, walks are gone on, and many thoughts are thought. Will James, the young boy, get his desired trip to the lighthouse? Only if it’s fair tomorrow, which his father assures him it won’t be.

In fact, we never learn if he goes there on that visit. Part two of the book is entitled ‘Time Passes’, and it certainly does. Ten years, in fact, including the First World War. Several characters die offstage. Woolf is content to tell us, in her inimitable style. Showing that kind of thing would not make sense here.

Then in the third section, what’s left of the family and invited guests visit the house again. Suffice it to say the weather is fine enough to make the trip, but the sixteen-year old James and his sister Cam do not want to go with their father, but are dragged along anyway.

I’m making light of it (ha ha), but it’s a work of complete genius in the way she takes us inside people’s thoughts. It is so convincing, even — perhaps especially — the teenage James. It can be difficult at times, but not in an unreadable way. Just in the complexity of the thought processes. Woolf was all about the interiority. It wil bear another reading, I’m sure. Probably several.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (Books 2018, 25)

I didn’t really know what to expect with this. I knew it was about, or set around, a party — in part because I’ve seen The Hours.

But it’s about so much more; and not really about the party very much at all. It’s an intriguing look at the mental lives of a range of people in London on a day in the 1920s. Not a very wide range of people, in that they’re all very much upper-middle to upper class. There are a few people from what would have been called the lower classes, but they’re just passersby, background colour. There is, however, a sympathy towards all people — from at least some of the characters.

Given the limited range of types of people, we get a remarkably effective insight into their mental lives. And it’s all done with reported thought. There is some actual dialogue, but very little. And we jump around from head to head promiscuously, but incredibly smoothly. There’s usually some handoff: the current viewpoint character sees someone, and then we’re in that person’s head. Or they might just think about someone, and now we hear the other person’s thoughts.

I guess this, along with Joyce, is one of the originators of the stream of consciousness as a literary device. An interesting thing to me is how it reminded me of other, later, works; which of course shows its influence. Most noticeable: Illuminatus! Now Robert Anton Wilson was a Joyce scholar, so he was probably coming more from that direction, but there are definitely some similarities of style, or at least echoes.

And — also from this year’s rereading — Walking On Glass. Especially in the contrast between the thoughts of people who are or are not “sane.”

It can be surprisingly confusing at times, such as when someone suddenly thinks of a person or an idea that hasn’t been mentioned before. But that just simulates the way our minds work. Our thoughts jump from topic to topic without an introductory paragraph, after all.

So it’s psychology, feminism, and a critique of (parts of) the British class system. Oh, and it’s also partly a love-letter to London. I thoroughly enjoyed it.