In Colm Toibin's novel, three generations of a dysfunctional family are reluctantly brought together, to face the death of their youngest member. Declan is in the final painful stages of Aids. Only now, as he nears the end, does he have the courage to tell his older sister and mother.
They gather, with two of his closest friends, in the grandmother's house on the edge of a crumbling cliff in southern Ireland. Unwelcome truths, buried for years, are brought into the open, as Declan's sister Helen and their mother Lily are forced to confront a mutual hostility bordering on hatred.
Helen has barely spoken to her mother in more than a decade and fears the worst as she goes to tell Lily the bad news. 'She realised that the bitter resentment against her mother which had clouded her life had not faded; for a long time she had hoped that she would never have to think about it again.' The tension is made worse because Declan has waited till this deathbed reunion to inform his mother he is a homosexual, and the fact that his two friends are also gay angers Lily, who treats them with vicious contempt.
As they come to terms with the inevitable, Helen, Lily and the grandmother go over the past, but are forced to admit that, like the Blackwater Lightship that used to be anchored near the cliff-face and shone far out to sea, some things disappear never to return. The mistakes of the past cannot all be made good in the present.
Life is ultimately about rotten compromises. There are too many cliches and stereotypes in this novel: the happy homosexual who keeps making 'gay' jokes to break the ice; the repressed Irish mother whose homophobic diatribes only make an awkward situation that much worse. And the interminable confessions, as characters who barely know each other share intimate confidences as if they were bosom buddies.
Helen has bottled up her emotions for 10 years and suddenly spills out her worst fears and anger to Declan's friend Paul. The critical state of Declan is the catalyst that turns them confessional, but this sudden transformation in Helen is not convincing.