The Light Pirate

The Light Pirate

By Lily Brooks-Dalton

Set in the near future, this hopeful story of survival and resilience follows Wanda—a luminous child born out of a devastating hurricane—as she navigates a rapidly changing world.

Florida is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels wreak gradual havoc on the state’s infrastructure, a powerful hurricane approaches a small town on the southeastern coast. Kirby Lowe, an electrical line worker, his pregnant wife, Frida, and their two sons, Flip and Lucas, prepare for the worst. When the boys go missing just before the hurricane hits, Kirby heads out into the high winds in search of his children. Left alone, Frida goes into premature labor and gives birth to an unusual child, Wanda, whom she names after the catastrophic storm that ushers her into a society closer to collapse than ever before.

As Florida continues to unravel, Wanda grows. Moving from childhood to adulthood, adapting not only to the changing landscape, but also to the people who stayed behind in a place abandoned by civilization, Wanda loses family, gains community, and ultimately, seeks adventure, love, and purpose in a place remade by nature.

Told in four parts—power, water, light, and time— The Light Pirate mirrors the rhythms of the elements and the sometimes quick, sometimes slow dissolution of the world as we know it. It is a meditation on the changes we would rather not see, the future we would rather not greet, and a call back to the beauty and violence of an untamable wilderness.

For a book about the end of the world, The Light Pirate is surprisingly peaceful. We follow the story of Wanda, from birth to death, in four sections, Power, Water, Light and Time. There is drastic upheaval, deaths, births, storms, fires, magic, murder and the loss of every marker of modern life, but the story uses a dreamy, semi-distant approach to these crises, so at no point does it feel as overwhelming as it otherwise might. 

In the first section, Power, yet another hurricane blows through a Florida that looks only a little more hard worn than the one we know today, devastating one particular family and resulting in the birth of a girl with an effervescent power. This is the most visceral and urgent section, describing a single 24 hour period, and the only one (with the exception of the epilogue) which is told linearly. With each subsequent section, we get more and more emotionally distant from the story.

In Water, ten years later, it is the last gasp of civilization, as Florida succumbs to nature, and the family is torn asunder again. 

Light, another ten or twenty years along, is the longest section, as it flits back and forth between the present, when Wanda finds potential new companionship, and fills in the gaps of the past, the final severing between Florida and the outside world, the loss of their home, and the loss of Wanda's mentor and mother figure. Time, which is a mere single chapter long, is the capstone to Wanda's arc and a look into what appears, finally, to be a stable and hopeful future. 

Although we dwell in detail on the decimation of life and property through the book, we spend no time at all on the creation of a new community which can survive the changes world. Perhaps that is why the ending appears optimistic: we don't wallow in the drudgery, the sheer effort of living, that even the best commune could offer under such circumstances. Whereas we hear in detail about the creeping encroachment of water and the sweat and pain of finding shelter in a world so blasted that it's impossible to be out in the daytime, we get to gloss over things like the return to a human existence where 50% of kids don't survive to their first birthday. (Something which was on the forefront of my mind, since Light introduces two women, one of whom must have had a kid since the loss of infrastructure, and one whom is imminently anticipating giving birth. As a reader, I'm immediately projecting the death of the mother and/or baby, which isn't, I assume, the tone the author was going for).

I don't think the epilogue is intended as trickery, I do think the author wants to offer hope. I just find myself cynical after seeing how far down the road we've already brought ourselves, with no expected reversal in sight. The last year has brought not only the inland mountain flooding in North Carolina, and the headlining wildfires of Los Angeles, but, in an eerily prescient twist, the widespread loss of electricity to the island or Puerto Rico on New Years Eve, due to deteriorating infrastructure. It's simultaneously hard to imagine a future in which the country simply abandons entire states (as tempting as the idea sounds, for other reasons), and yet hard to deny that seems overwhelmingly difficult to reverse - if we even had agreement on the whys and hows (and ifs!) it should be.

The depressing subject matter notwithstanding, it's a little treasure of a book. The descriptions of nature, the glimpses into a life which is both beyond comprehension yet all too real, the way the characters find the strength to keep going and continue making connections in spite of the odds. The primary relationship is between Wanda and Phyllis, an older neighbor, who eventually takes Wanda under her wing and gives her the tools (literally and figuratively) to survive. I mentioned this before, but aside from the first section, the entire book feels dreamlike and drifting, letting the atmosphere seep into the story at every level.

The Light Pirate seems to say both that the destruction of civilization is inevitable, and that we must adapt to the world, instead of adapting the world to us, if we wish to survive. I sure hope it's wrong. 

 

 

49: A Dystopian Book With A Happy Ending