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Lighthousekeeping |  |
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Lighthousekeeping | |
The main character, Silver, is an orphan taken in by the lighthouse keeper, Pew. While learning the job of "tending the light," Silver also learns to tend stories. Each lighthouse holds a story, the legend goes, and Pew appears to know them all. Now Silver must collect those stories so she can be the one to retell them.
This is clearly Winterson's mission, too, and some of the novel's most striking sections are homages to the art of storytelling. Pew's stories go back through time and have the feel of tradition and myth. Yet Winterson has written this book in her distinctive, form-defying style. Lighthousekeeping extols the importance of keeping stories alive at the same time that it pulls the traditions apart. "A beginning, a middle and an end is the proper way to tell a story," she writes. "But I have difficulty with that method."
Winterson has often combined essay and even philosophy with her fiction. At times, her writing can resemble pure thought. Sometimes she thinks in fantasy (story), and sometimes she thinks in ideas (essay). When she does either of these in Lighthousekeeping, her writing is marvelous and vivid. But often the two forms get confused. Too many characters feel like ideas -- Miss Pinch is everything petty and mean, for instance. While Dark is a complex character, his story becomes a morality tale whose lesson is heavy-handed and overstated.
Lighthousekeeping begins to lose its way about midway through, after Silver and Pew learn that the government will automate the lighthouse. Clearly Winterson is lamenting what is lost in the midst of progress, but she doesn't do much with that idea. The book rather haphazardly follows Silver through a few troubles, then to a love affair with a woman, but these sections don't hold the power of her days with Pew. Though the book purports to honor storytelling, it's not a particularly successful story.
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
Known for her slyly metaphysical tinkering with narrative conventions, time, space, and gender, British writer Winterson took a new tack in her whimsical children's book, King of Capri (2003), which seems to have engendered a new simplicity of style. Not that this enchanting, funny, history-raiding, and literature-borrowing tale of an orphan seeking her fortune on Scotland's rugged coast lacks dimension. Quite the contrary. Young Silver (so much is in a name) is taken in by Pew, the old, blind lighthouse keeper, who teaches her that to "tend the light" is to learn and tell stories. Stories do save lives, but they also destroy them. Take the stories Minister Babel Dark, who sometimes goes by the name Lux, tells to conceal his double life. His lies make him suicidal yet provide Robert Louis Stevenson with a terrific plot. Then there's the tragic tale of Tristan and Isolde and the story of natural selection, which even Darwin admits makes for a "less comfortable" world. Add to that Silver's own misadventures, and Winterson's fables-within-a-fable turn into a bewitching demonstration of the power of storytelling, the force that defines the self and links us to the past and each other. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
"The continuous narrative of existence is a lie . . . there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark." Winterson's latest is all about light and dark, love and its absence. The British author gives us two lives from two centuries. A 19th-century man travels from light into darkness; a 20th-century girl travels, stumblingly, from darkness into light. Silver, the girl, lives with her mother in Salts, on Scotland's northwestern coast, sailor father long gone. When Silver is ten, in 1969, a mighty wind blows her mother into oblivion, and Silver is taken in by Pew, the lighthouse keeper, as his apprentice. Pew is blind but has a good heart, and his storytelling saves Silver from despair. The tale concerns the lighthouse, its founder, wealthy Bristol merchant Josiah Dark, and his son, Babel, who in 1848 seemed set to marry his pretty girlfriend Molly. That story comes to us in fragments, interleaved with Silver's. Babel's dark is of his own making when, suspecting, wrongly, that Molly has another lover, he punishes her with blows, then enters the clergy and a loveless marriage in far distant Silts. The moral is simple: "Never doubt the one you love." There will be flashes of light in Babel's later life before the dark closes in for good. Meanwhile, poor Silver's life plunges into dark again; Pew's love had sustained her, but now the lighthouse is automated and he vanishes. Silver goes south, begins to steal, has a breakdown. Much later, on a Greek island, she finds true love (her lover is a woman, but that's secondary). The novel, gloriously edgy at the start (there's a schoolteacher guaranteed to freeze your blood), now settles into the groove of a generic pastoral idyll, and the writing suffers. Please notice, though, that Silver's lover has Pew's long fingers: all the lives here are connected, and the nameless joins the circle that binds Babel and Pew and Silver. Uneven work from this always provocative writer. (Kirkus Reviews)
A treat for the discerning reader who likes 'something a little different'. When Silver's mother falls down a cliff, leaving her daughter parentless, Silver is apprenticed to Blind Pew, Lighthousekeeper at Cape Wrath, on the north-eastern tip of Scotland. Pew is not only expert at his job, despite his disability, but he has 'a bag of stories under his arm' which he shares with Silver. Running Parallel are the adventures of the Reverend Babel Dark, Minister of the local church, and his two wives - one of whom he takes on honeymoon to the 185l Great Exhibition. (The other lives in Bath.) When, inevitably, the Light is automated, Silver travels the world, and meets the love of her life. Twenty years later she returns. Little has changed, though Pew is now only a ghost. What lifts the book above the ordinary is the author's idiosyncratic writing-style - especially her use of (sometimes startling) metaphor and simile, which makes her work both stimulating, and a delight to read. (Kirkus UK) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
PRAISE FOR LIGHTHOUSEKEEPING
"Hypnotic . . . Atmospheric and elusive, Winterson's high-modernist excursion is an inspired meditation on myth and language."
-THE NEW YORKER
"A luminous retelling of the Tristan-Isolde legend and an account of the grown-up Silver's pursuit of love . . . Winterson weaves a beautiful and coherent tapestry . . . She achieves a quality that justly can be called visionary."-LOS ANGELES TIMES
