The Last Lighthouse Keeper

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1999, £ 16.99

Alan Titchmarch is a well-known BBC television presenter of gardening programmes.  He has also contributed to BBC publications.  Now he has turned his hand to a novel.  He acknowledges generously the many friends who have advised him about the difficulties of yachting vocabulary (port and starboard, sheets and cleats, tides and navigation) and the outcome is this undemanding feel-good story about love, renunciation and smuggling amongst the "richly colourful characters" of an imaginary Cornish fishing village.

Will, the last lighthouse keeper of the title, finds himself at a loose end after the end of his employment by Trinity House.  He resolves to buy a boat and sail around the British Isles.  Whilst fitting-out his chosen craft (a Dunkirk little ship) he meets Amy, a promising artist who has a studio in the village.  They fall in love or, at any rate, enjoy much enthusiastic copulation.  After they have solved an outbreak of smuggling that is defeating the police, they part, so that she can continue her artistic career.  On the last page or so, he gives up his sailing ambitions and they fall back into one another's arms.

Now it is up to the reader to take advice on the confusing vocabulary of the gardener and to write the definitive novel of love among the richly colourful characters of the local flower-show committee. - GYE

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