The Light Between Oceans: Read the Book or Watch the Film?

‘The Light Between Oceans’ a novel by M.L. Stedman that was adapted into a film by Derek Cianfrance in 2016 is a miraculous and unfortunate story about a couple. Tom (Michael Fasdbender) and Isabel Sherbourne (Alicia Vikander) living solely on a small Island, Janus Rock, off the west coast of Australia, maintain a lighthouse ensuring the safety of boats miles away from human vision. After multiple miscarriages, it seems like fate when an infant washes up in a dinghy on the shore. Despite the honest intentions of desiring to raise a child, painful consequences arise.

The physical distance between the Sherbourne’s and human civilization is “100 miles in any direction,” meaning, in theory they can get away with adopting the baby girl, “no one will know she’s not (theirs).” Tom is hesitant to not report the baby as his occupation as a lighthouse keeper requires. However, Isabel convinces him, saying that the “little chicken” would end up in a horrid orphanage and by taking her in as their own they would, in a sense, be protecting the girl and hence Tom would not be abandoning his duty to keep safe the boats and the people the light of the lighthouse reaches. This significance of the lighthouse as a symbolic representation of isolation and safety is not made apparent in the film. The novel describes the maintenance and function of the beacon in great detail explaining the science behind how a small filament can project such luminosity. In the film however, the lighthouse is simply an ornamental backdrop. It does seem that this allusive device is reduced in Derek Cianfrance’s adaptation to only highlight the setting whilst M.L. Stedman’s novel utilises Australian topography to serve as the mise-en-scène. This is another factor that gets distorted in the film, which does not depict the characteristic flora, fauna, “the crickets, the owls, the snakes” and WWI in an Australian context, that the author pays attention to. Though certainly the concepts of parenthood, loss, morality and war are universal, the nuances of the story are distinctly Australian. Just as the island country had no personal animosity and reason to take part in a war occurring on the other side of the planet — only doing so under the governance of the monarchy — Tom and Isabel living on their island miles away from the mainland, take in the child not from a place of contempt, but are only doing so under their sincere desire to raise a family. This brings me back to the topic of the lighthouse.

It is important to explore how the structure serves to represent the physical separation Tom and Isabel experience, which assists in creating a separation from reality. Though the trauma and ill-deeds Tom experienced and had to commit during WWI are certainly insinuated in the onscreen adaptation, it fails to convey how getting married and raising a family was a dream — Tom thought not viable for him due to the sins of war he played a part in — made possible through the isolation from civilization and consequently reality, that the island provided, symbolized by the lighthouse. So, when Tom reveals the true origins of his daughter, he is “giving up the…dream.” Similarly Isabel, though not having served in the army, did suffer the consequences of war. The death of both her brothers meant that being able to create a sort of new family and new life after this loss was healing. So, when she couldn’t have her own child, the baby girl washing up onto shore meant that Isabel could still fulfill this dream within the bounds of the Island, despite the reality that the child already had a family, worried about where their beloved child was. Clearly, the Sherbourne’s are attempting to build a new life for themselves and this idea can be seen through the semantics of Janus Rock. Janus being the Roman God of doors and transitions, representing the middle ground between abstract concepts of beginnings and endings, life and death, right and wrong. Hence, the Island allows for the tangible manifestation of the characters desires.\

As insinuated above, the Roman God Janus anthropomorphises the land mass by reflecting the conflicting thoughts of what is right and what is wrong that the characters contemplate. The environs — Pacific and Indian Ocean — of the island underscores this theme of morality. Being situated between the oceans, Janus Rock becomes a literal middle ground and gray area between two waterbodies typifying two ends of the probity scale. This is the core subject of the novel, thus the film certainly gives space for both the adoptees (Tom and Isabel) and the biological mother’s sentiments to be showcased and understood. However, likely due to the time constraint films adhere to, Derek Cianfrance’s adaptation focuses on these three characters, brushing over the multiple histories, experiences and perspectives of the secondary characters. In the novel, the supporting characters input an array of opinions regarding the difficult situation of whether what Tom and Isabel did was wrong, deepening the idea M.L Stedman proposes, that state of affairs are not always black and white and that sometimes people “strike it lucky” and other times they’re “left with the short straw.”

As far as film adaptations go, Derek Cianfrance’s ‘The Light Between Oceans’ based on M.L. Stedman’s novel of the same name, is a noteworthy accurate transformation from the typographic media nature of novels to the visual media nature of films. All the events, characters and much of the dialogue has been taken straight from the novel. Hence, whether you choose to read the book or watch the film you’ll still be able to understand the core ideas and enjoy the complexity of the story. However, there are discrepancies in the themes of loss and morality and the symbolic purpose of the setting is made redundant when the book is translated onto a screen.