STARGAZING

Artist and critic Hill’s spry, fittingly outlandish account of his six months as a lighthouse keeper on three islands off the west coast of Scotland.

“Before I took the job I didn’t really think through what a lighthouse keeper actually did,” admits Hill, whose marvelous prose recalls Michael Caine’s flavorsome voiceover for The Man Who Would Be King. In 1973, Hill was a freshly minted art student, 19 years old, looking for something out of the way. “We will pay your return fare to Edinburgh,” came the eager reply to his inquiry about a lighthouse keepership, “and sure enough there was a tiny claim form, hand typed, attached with a small gold paperclip.” What came next were stints on three distant islands—and you would have to be a hard soul not to recognize the magic in Pladda, Ailsa Craig, and Hyskeir, where Hill learned the jack-of-all-trades life: how to wind a light like a grandfather clock; how to sleep in two-hour intervals, savoring that sleep as if it was a fine wine; how to cook (he would become intimately acquainted with haggis), for food is the lubricant that keeps the lights turning; how to practice the fine, unconventional art of living in close quarters with the other keepers, three or four to a house. Conversation with his peers was as nourishing as the meals, and Hill has come to think that mandatory lighthouse training “would be enough to re-invent society” in the pacifistic, organic sense he admires. Sadly, “as I write this there are no longer any manned lighthouses around the coast of Britain. . . . It’s a damn shame and it makes you want to cry.”

Written with an incandescence that would make a beacon proud, in prose turned and tempered by an interlude of 30 years between the act and the telling.