The Illuminations captures the colours and the contours of a fading memory

Andrew O’Hagan’s sixth novel brilliantly weaves together Scotland and Afghanistan, dementia and the chaos of war.

British soldiers in Afghanistan, where one of the characters is serving. Corporal Barry Lloyd RLC/HO / Ministry of Defence / AFP

A failing mind has quickly become the most alluring of narrative devices. From Mitch Cullin's depiction of a doddering Sherlock Holmes in A Slight Trick of the Mind, through female protagonists struggling with Alzheimer's in Elizabeth Healey's Costa First Novel Award-winning Elizabeth is Missing and Emma Hooper's recent Etta and Otto and Russell and James; and now the twice Booker-nominated Andrew O'Hagan's fifth novel The Illuminations unravels the story of an 82-year-old with dementia.

In the 1960s Anne Quirk was a pioneering documentary photographer snapping teenagers out and about in the northern English seaside resort of Blackpool, famous for its beachfront illuminations. Now she resides in sheltered-living accommodation in the Scottish coastal town of Saltcoats, where the “flotsam” of her past – a murky collection of stories, some with less truth to them than others – is floating to the surface. The confusion this entails is not necessarily new, since Anne has always been a secretive woman; thus, as her mind becomes unmoored, she’s both “fading away and becoming known at the same time”.

Her beloved grandson Luke is a 29-year-old officer in the British Army serving in Afghanistan. He read English at university, but then joined the army. It’s a decision attributed to familial identity: his father was killed serving in Ireland – “Men are sentimental about institutions,” we’re told, as if that lays it to rest.

The action switches between Scotland and Afghanistan – the former told from the narrative perspectives of Anne, her neighbour Maureen, whose voice opens the novel as a wandering Anne knocks on her door at 5am, and Anne’s daughter Alice. O’Hagan juxtaposes the heat and chaos of the Afghan desert with the days slowly dripping by in Saltcoats, the increasing unreality of either world making for a slippage between the two that’s less disorientating than one would expect. The bond between Anne and Luke is a close one – she read his university texts as he did so they could discuss them – and in many ways she taught him how to see the world around him.

“The colour red doesn’t actually exist,” Anne tells Luke when he’s younger. “It only exists as an idea in your head. Always remember that. You create it yourself when your imagination meets the light.” Once you read this, crimson flashes everywhere – fire in battle, the fresh spurt of blood, the hackle on the Royal Western Fusiliers dress uniform, a bereaved father’s angry face, the “red pumping chasm” of the dance floor in a Blackpool club, the memory of “red leaves spinning in the yard”, and bulbs shining in the dark on the ­seafront.

It’s the same effect with the myriad lights that burn brightly in the novel, slowly illuminating it from within as you turn the pages. It’s not that O’Hagan’s heavy-handed with the metaphor, but once you notice the first faint glimmers, the effect is a bit like that of the Illuminations themselves being turned on – “The pop singer hit the button and light travelled up the tower and spread from there like a beautiful, endless halo over the whole city” – a domino effect as these bursts of flame flicker through the book: snowflakes tumbling through the glare of a street lamp, “like sparks from a bonfire”; “two yellow blinks” lighting an otherwise deep, dark stretch of sea; the flash of machine-gun fire against a dark night; a “single beam” of light cast across an old photograph; gleaming cutlery on a dinner table; the neon signs that glowed in the dark above a Glasgow station.

Gleam and glean become intertwined as light is bound up in the notion of truth, Anne’s on the fringes of the trailblazing group of photographers known as “the Young Meteors”, and Luke’s platoon is part of a convoy delivering a turbine to the Kajaki Dam, bringing light to the Afghan people, a mission that becomes caught up in grand ideas of “Alexander the Great and all that? Truth and enlightenment? Pulling the savage people out of the dark ages?” Terrible things happen in the dark in this novel, and secrets languish in the gloom for decades. The premise is a tried and tested one, but within this O’Hagan’s plot and structure is satisfyingly ambitious; as Anne says, “form told its own story”.

The book is available on Amazon.

Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist who lives in London.