Flashlight exerts a pull that can feel like an undertow, and all the more so for how deliberately it's structured around secrets and absences - both of which effects are apt in light of the novel's opening and structuring scene of father (Serk) and daughter (Louisa) on the beach at night, and Serk's disappearance and presumed drowning.
It covers a lot of ground - temporal and geographic - and is balanced with a skill and integrity that means the twists and reveals are surprises, but always in retrospect connected to what's been showed before, and the endings for its three central characters (the third being Anne, Louisa's mother) feel inevitable in their emotional timbres and broad outlines even though the specifics aren't predictable.
There's a control to the book's events and tone that I find impressive - the damage taken by all of its characters from their childhoods onward is depicted without exploitation or cheap shock, and their limitations as adults follow naturally - so I felt I understood and empathised despite how frequently unsympathetic their actions towards each other and others are.
And it's direct, and graceful, in painting the broader historical and social contexts that are Flashlight's co-equal subject together with its lens on individual and familial relationships and gaps - across Japan, Korea and the DPRK from the second world war onwards.
Its focus on family and individual characters across multiple generations feels 'novelistic' in a way that's almost a throwback - or at least not the type of fiction I commonly read. But I was carried along by it. I liked Trust Exercise more, but this one has a charge of its own.
