Four years after finding a dead man and a baby washed up on Janus Island off Western Australia Tom Sherbourne sits brooding in prison. A memory flares from his time as the island’s lighthouse keeper and he recalls, “The woomph of the oil vapour igniting into brilliance at the touch of his match. The rainbows thrown by the prisms. The oceans spreading themselves before him about Janus like a secret gift.”

It’s a positive recollection given all that transpires for Tom and his wife Isabel after they decide to bury the man and keep the baby girl to bring up as their own.

The couple’s choices yield consequences far beyond their imaginings — and I won’t spoil the intrigue by revealing too much of how matters unfold.

What I will say, however, is that Stedman layers the events in The Light Between Oceans so beautifully that Tom and Isabel’s story is compelling.

Their isolation on the windswept island is palpable and Stedman uses it to good effect. She shows clearly how much easier it is to make a morally questionable decision when you don’t have to face the people affected by what you do.

Legacy of loss

Tom is a World War I veteran who takes the post on Janus Island to help him escape the scars of war and damage done by his family.

Isabel also carries wounds.

Her brothers died in the Somme and, like so many others of the era, she bears the pain of this stoically and with little chance or ability to talk about it. At one point she wonders whether she is “still technically a sister” now that her adored brothers are dead. “Widow,” she thinks, is the word used when a married person loses their spouse. But there is no word to describe her place in the scheme of things after her loss.

Isabel has several agonising miscarriages on the island.

After one of these miscarriages, she lies on the kitchen floor with her “almost baby” as the clock ticks on relentlessly.

“A life had come and gone and nature had not paused a second for it. The machine of time and space grinds on, and people are fed through it like grist through a mill.”

The combined effect of these losses, plus the urgency of life after the war, leads Isabel to believe that the baby has been sent to her by God to look after and cherish.

The couple call the baby Lucy — and she brings much longed-for light into their lives.

Prisms on place

To create Janus Island and to understand Tom’s work, Stedman visited the Leeuwin Lighthouse and the Cape Naturaliste Lighthouse in Western Australia (WA) and spent time in the Australian National Archives going through light-keeper logbooks and correspondence from the period.

She also wrote some parts of the novel in cottages overlooking the Indian Ocean staring out at where she imagined Parteguese — the other main, fictional, WA-based location featured in The Light Between Oceans — to be.

Tom tells Isabel that the island is named after Janus, the god who has two faces, back to back. The god of doorways, he says, “Always looking both ways, torn between two ways of seeing things.

“January looks forward to the new year and back to the old year. He [Janus] sees past and future. And the island looks in the direction of two different oceans, down to the South Pole and up to the Equator.”

Tom’s comments illuminate an overarching theme of the novel — that every story has at least two sides.

Stedman’s research also uncovered several incidents of unrest in Western Australia connected to Germans, during and after the war, that informed plot points relating to Frank Roennfeldt, an Austrian, who is Lucy’s biological father.

Poring over field diaries and battalion journals, Stedman sobbed in the British Library reading rooms as she absorbed the heartrending accounts from Australian WWI veterans told privately, factually and without self-pity.

As a result, perhaps, some of the bravest and most powerful writing in The Light Between Oceans relates to war, small communities and their silences.

Here’s a sample:

The town draws a veil over certain events. This is a small community, where everyone knows that sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember. Children can grow up having no knowledge of the indiscretion of their father in his youth, or of the illegitimate sibling who lives fifty miles away and bears another man’s name. History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent.

That is how life goes on — protected by the silence that anaesthetises shame. Men who came back from the war with stories they could have told about the desperate failing of comrades at the point of death say only that they died bravely. To the outside world, no soldier ever visited a brothel or acted like a savage or ran and hid from the enemy. Being over there was punishment enough. When wives have to hide the mortgage money or the kitchen knives from a husband who’s lost the thread, they do it without a word, sometimes acknowledging it not even to themselves.

Stedman was surprised when her manuscript sparked a bidding war involving nine publishers and six-figure fees. I’m not. The Light Between Oceans is a beguiling novel with well-drawn central and minor characters, an intriguing plot and a captivating setting.

It also broaches universal themes of love and truth, war and family that are connecting with readers the world over.

At last count, the novel was being translated into 25 languages; no mean feat for a first-time author.

It’s a good sign, too, that Stedman has given up practising law and is now writing fiction full-time. Let’s hope this means she’ll be shedding her prismatic light on our reading shores again soon.

The Light Between Oceans
M. L. Stedman
Vintage Australia, 2012, $19.95.