Beneath little Gilmour's happiness lies a silent iceberg.
"Lighthouse Boy" is the work of Spanish author Alexandre Palomas, which has been compared to "The Little Prince" by many critics, calling its beautiful and pure words, soothing not only the numbing touch of adults, but also the original story with a childlike heart, touching everyone's deep loneliness and true longing.
Those who have read this book can easily classify it as a type of mutual redemption, the story of a child who is no more than ten years old, after experiencing the death of his mother, in turn comforts and saves his broken father.
The whole novel uses two world perspectives, one is through the "I" as the first person boy Gilmore Jr., the other is the boy as a counselor Maria perspective, the two narrative perspectives switch back and forth, comprehensively and accurately showing the reader the spiritual world of a ten-year-old boy.
In the chapter of Gilmour Jr.'s narrative, we can clearly see what kind of external environment he is exposed to, he is just in the fourth grade, does not get along with boys, likes to play with girls, has no interest in sports such as football, is overly sensitive, and has a superior level of intelligence. Crucially, little Gilmour was obsessed with the fairy Mary.
At a dream symposium, the teacher asked the children what kind of person they wanted to be when they grew up, and the answers of the students were various. Some boys want to be football players, some girls want to be supermodels, some children want to volunteer for the president in the future, some children want to be doctors in the world, but when it is the turn of little Gilmour, this slightly shy boy says "I want to be a fairy Mary." ”
The teacher was shocked to find that fairy Mary, such a fantasy-filled virtual character, really lived in the world of little Gilmour, the boy did not think that fairy Mary was a false character, he naively thought that fairy Mary lived in London, he wanted to grow up to become a fairy Mary, so that he could fly in the sky, and could use spells to fulfill many wishes.
Little Gilmour's quirks soon attracted the attention of maria, a psychology teacher who, after studying gilmour's family relationships, found that it was a child who lacked maternal love and neglected by his father, which is why when Maria asked Gilmour "if he wanted to work as a mother in Dubai", the boy would shy away from giving a negative answer.
"Little Gilmour, tell me now, no one will know, do you miss your mother very much, or do you only think about it a little?" There was silence," little Gilmour replied. The voice insisted. It was even more silent. Finally, little Gilmour finally spoke: "No. ”
How could such an age be so alienated from his own mother? The psychiatrist has another concern for little Gilmour, perhaps, beneath little Gilmour's fantasies about the fairy Mary, there are actually heavy icebergs hidden. His age has long since fallen out of the stage of not being able to distinguish between virtual and real, and if gilmour Jr. is allowed to fantasy fairy tales, it is likely that he will have serious personality problems in adulthood.
In view of Gilmour Jr.'s shy expression, Maria performed "art therapy" for him, that is, in the psychological therapy of one class per week, Gilmore Jr. needed to submit a painting to the teacher, which also became the key to solving the fairy riddle.
The first painting that Little Gilmour gave to the psychology teacher Maria was of his father's study at home, and with the door of the study in the lower right of the painting open, a man sat at a computer desk, his face covered in tears. Behind the man was a locker, and on the upper floor of the cabinet was a treasure chest. In addition to the study, the upper left of the picture depicts an airplane, on which stands the mother of the flight attendant, followed by the fairy Mary.
In addition to this, there are several strange rectangular windows floating on the screen, and there are people in the windows, scattered up and down in the painting.
"How many windows are there in the painting, little Gilmour?" I asked. He looked at me, frowned, and said, "That's not the window." ” "It's a letter, it's actually an envelope, and the letter is in it." "It's a letter from my mother."
The psychology teacher Maria wants to gradually piece together the truth of his obsession with the fairy Mary through a few paintings painted by little Gilmour, which is not easy, first of all, Little Guillermo's paintings are very abstract, and he has to explain the details every time to understand, and secondly, Because Mary has never understood the reason for Little Gilmour's resistance and alienation from his mother.
It wasn't until the last lesson of psychotherapy that a picture unraveled the family's most intimate wounds.
In the last picture painted by Little Gilmour, lightning and thunder in the sky, while his mother becomes a mermaid, happily swimming in the deep sea.
The secret Mary learns from a series of paintings painted by Gilmour from childhood is that his mother has disappeared, and his father has been hiding this fact from Gilmour, trying to deceive him with the clumsy practice of imitating handwriting... But Gilmour already knew the truth about his mother's disappearance.
From the first painting to the sixth painting, the ostensibly happy little Gilmore vents the sadness buried in the depths of his consciousness through painting after painting, the disappearing mother who can't see his face, the father who sits in front of the screen in the middle of the night and washes his face with tears, and the silent silence in the home since his mother left. On another level, little Gilmour did not run away like his father, but used this way to remind himself of the fact that his mother was no longer there.
In fact, it was not Gilmould jr. himself who had been able to emerge from the shadow of grief, but his father.
Little Gilmour's father deceived his children into deceiving himself with a lot of lies, and he wrote many letters that his wife would never receive, telling the children that his mother had only gone far away to work, but unfortunately, sitting in front of the computer in the middle of the night crying, exposing everything. His wife suffered an air crash on the day he left for Dubai, and he never came out of the pain of his wife disappearing into the deep sea.
Little Gilmour actually already knew his father's defenses and deception, he did not dare to get up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet, afraid that his father would find out the secret of his deception, so he often wet his pants in the middle of the night; he immersed himself in the story of "Fairy Mary" that his mother had told him in the past, but hoped that the spell of Fairy Mary would save his father who was in a low period and had no desire for life.
He used his own way and secrets to dissolve all the pressures and pains of his father, and at this moment, his soul was not young, even more mature than his father.
I once read the phrase in a book of healing in the heart, "A child has an old soul." "In the energy field of spiritual healing, compared to adults and children, they are real veterans, they have innate acumen and awareness, and can adapt to their living environment in a very short period of time, but children are less able to express themselves in logical language."
In life, parents and children give to each other, and adults often feel that they have paid a lot for their children to be cattle and horses, in fact, the gifts given to us by children are more and more precious. Parents give their children more of a material guarantee of life, but what children import into adults in reverse is a real spiritual treasure.
Just like the father and son in "Lighthouse Boy", the father does not want to face the sudden death of his wife and closes himself, and by the way, he uses self-righteous deception, thinking that he can hide from the sky and cross the sea by lying to the child that "the mother went to work somewhere else", but he does not know that the child has already seen everything, heard everything, and sensed everything that the father is afraid of.
Children's perception is unimaginable to adults. That's why the book is called The Lighthouse, because little Gilmour's obsessive performance of "Fairy Mary" at the party is actually his deep love for his father and mother.
The mother who can never come back has become an irreparable pain in the hearts of father and son, but little Gilmour transforms this pain into redemption for his father, and uses his best efforts to persevere to protect the only father who is almost broken.
The most touching thing is at the end of the novel, after hearing everything that Teacher Maria said, the father rushed to the school party scene at the last second, but what he saw was the little Gilmore who was wet with rain, he took the wrong costume for the performance, and had to wear his father's long sweatpants, standing in the spotlight.
Still, Gilmour Jr. gritted his teeth and picked up the microphone to face the audience.
My mother was gone, he missed her so much, and sometimes when I couldn't see him, he would keep crying and still writing letters in a notebook. But Mom lives at the bottom of the sea, and I don't think she can get those letters because there's no postman there... In order to keep his mother from leaving, he put her into a box on the cupboard, but her mother was already gone...
The father below the stage walked into the spotlight, the father and son staring at each other, and when the father finally changed the clothes of the fairy Mary for the child, the climax of the book appeared.
"Daddy, Mommy may not be coming back, so what about you, can you not die?"
"Of course not, kid, I'll never die."
Father asked Little Gilmour, "Do you still want to sing the song of Fairy Mary?" ”
Little Gilmour shook his head, "No, I'd rather go to a restaurant for pizza, is it okay to have a little coke?" ”
At the end of the story, the father and son walked off the stage holding hands like this, and they reached the deepest part of their hearts in the curtain, melted all the resentment and incomprehension about fate, and faced the loneliness and real longing in each other's lives.
At first glance, this book looks a lot like the fable of "The Little Prince", but it obviously knows more about poking people's tears than "The Little Prince".
Little Gilmour is like a lighthouse, the secret he guards is to heal his father, he also knows that the fairy Mary herself does not exist, but the only way he can think of can be achieved by the "magic" of fantasy, so he uses seemingly silly absurd behavior to guide his father from loneliness to the path of healing.
Along the way, we see the secret that a family strives to hide, and we see the pain that everyone is trying to forget in the secret, and we see the relief under the lighthouse, just like the comment of the famous American news "Huffington Post":
"As we read, we wanted to laugh, we wanted to cry, and we wanted to hold little Gilmour tightly in our arms, as if it were another self that had been left behind."