Starling Lawrence, The Lightning Keeper (HarperCollins, 2006)
I first ran across this title on the 'new' table at our local Borders Books and Music a few weeks ago. I have a fondness for historical novels with industrial and technological themes, so I didn't hesitate to claim it when a review copy arrived at the Green Man offices not long after. Author Starling Lawrence earns his living as the editor-in-chief and vice chairman of W. W. Norton, an independent, employee-owned publishing house based in New York City. The biosketch on the dust jacket notes that he also lives in northwestern Connecticut part of the time. Interestingly enough, that is the primary setting for The Lightning Keeper.
In the novel, the town is known as Beecher's Bridge. The real town is Norfolk, incorporated in 1758 and located roughly midway between Hartford and Albany. Both the fictitious and the real town entered the industrial revolution early on, with mills built along the banks of the fast flowing river (named Buttermilk in The Lightning Keeper, Blackberry in Norfolk) and its tributary streams. The town has the highest elevation of any place in Connecticut and allegedly the coldest winters. Using asides that sound as though they are narrated by a tour guide or town historian, Lawrence does an admirable job of describing Beecher's Bridge, down to and including some of the factories, already falling into disrepair by the time this story takes place in the years just before World War I. Beecher's Bridge sounds not unlike other mill towns of literary fame, such as Peyton Place and Empire Falls, to name two examples that came to my mind as I read the book.
The Lightning Keeper is fundamentally a love story. This becomes evident in the Prologue, in which the main female character, Harriet, recalls the first time she met Toma, the main male character, on the docks in Naples in 1908, when she was traveling there with her parents just before her mother died of consumption. Toma Pekocevic is a Montenegrin Serb with reasonably good English skills who helps Harriet and her family during their stay in Italy. What he's doing in Naples remains a mystery within the context of this book. While Harriet doesn't exactly characterize the encounter as love at first sight, she certainly carried a strong memory of Toma with her into young adulthood.
Harriet, we soon discover, is the only child of Amos Bigelow, the current owner of the family ironworks in Beecher's Bridge. By 1914, when this novel begins, she is working as the firm's accountant and office manager, a position she apparently assumed because no one else wanted it. When we encounter father and daughter some six years after the Naples incident, they are in New York City, where Amos is courting a contract to supply iron wheels to a firm that has a fast turnaround order for a very large number of subway cars. By this time, the widowed Amos is nearly deaf and more than a little absent-minded. The ironworks has fallen on hard times, and this contract is one of those make-or-break deals, as Mr. Bigelow sees it. What he fails to see is that his mill doesn't really have the production capacity needed to handle this job.
Coincidentally (The Lightning Keeper is full of such coincidences), Toma has emigrated to the U.S. and is employed by the very same New York City firm that Harriet and her father are visiting. Even more coincidentally, he encounters Harriet waiting for her father, drives them back to Connecticut after Amos fires their driver for drinking on the job -- and convinces his boss that he should stay on site to oversee the manufacture of the wheels. One thing leads to another, and Toma takes the lead in getting an abandoned part of the plant back on line in order to increase production and develops a design for a turbine that is more efficient than the water wheels that the old New England factories have been using to power their machinery for nearly a hundred years. With some help from physics textbooks and a couple of the old-timers at the ironworks, Toma figures out that he can use the turbine to generate electricity as well as to drive machines directly. Some of the narrative is considerably more technical than this, so if you think such language would put you to sleep or drive you crazy, The Lightning Keeper may not be your cup of tea.
Through Senator Fowler Truscott, a scion of one of Beecher Bridge's old families, Toma (or Thomas Peacock as he was named at Ellis Island) meets Charles Coffin, Chairman of the General Electric Corporation and later makes the acquaintance of the brilliant and eccentric German-American inventor Charles Steinmetz, employed by GE. Half in love with Harriet, Steinmetz starts to make regular visits to Beecher's Bridge. At about the same time, Toma signs an employment contract with GE, the Bigelow Ironworks becomes the site of a secret development project, and the townspeople don't know what to make of it all. To make matters even more interesting, when the Archduke Ferdinand is assassinated at Sarajevo by a Serb, Toma launches into an agony of indecision about whether to stay in Connecticut or return to his childhood home while General Electric gets more serious about finding alternative ways to generate large amounts of energy.
Oh, what about that love story I mentioned at the beginning of this review? Well, let's just say that Toma doesn't win Harriet's hand without years of effort. The problem isn't just the difference in their social status, although that's not entirely insignificant. It's more directly related to the steady and then precipitous decline of the Bigelow Ironworks which results in Harriet and her likewise declining father having a great deal of debt to cover. I don't want to give away too much of the plot around this, but this part of the story reminded me of the Laurie Anderson line, 'at the beginning of the movie, they knew they'd have to find each other, but they rode off in completely opposite directions.' It all works out in the end, sort of.
Both Coffin and Steinmetz are real historical persons. So is Toma's role model and hero, the eccentric Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla. In fact, Lawrence includes their photos at the start of some of the book's chapters (other chapters open with archival photos of electrical inventions and scenes from Norfolk). While Thomas Peacock/Toma Pekocevic does not appear to be a real historical person, he may be based in part on the Serbian physicist Mihajlo Pupin, who emigrated to the US at the age of sixteen, taught at Columbia University and spent time in Norfolk in his later years.
As I started looking around when I began writing this review, I learned that Lawrence had written another novel, Montenegro, published in 1997 on Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It was easy enough for the brownies to find a copy for me. What I realized as I began to leaf through its pages is that The Lightning Keeper is actually the sequel to Montenegro. That realization put several elements of the former novel into perspective, including Toma's self-admission that Harriet reminds him of an earlier love, his longing to return to his homeland and his active correspondence with his friends and family there. I considered including both books into this review, but when I opened the package containing Montenegro, I discovered another novel about the Balkans tucked inside, so I decided to review those as a pair and leave The Lightning Keeper to stand on its own. Which it does, very nicely.
