Lighthousekeeping - Hardcover

Winterson, Jeanette

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151011176 ISBN 13: 9780151011179

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005

Synopsis

My mother called me Silver. I was born part precious metal, part pirate.

Orphaned and anchorless, Silver is taken in by blind Mr. Pew, the mysterious and miraculously old keeper of the Cape Wrath lighthouse. Pew tells Silver ancient tales of longing and rootlessness, of journeys that move through place and time, of passion and betrayal. His stories center on Babel Dark, a local nineteenth-century clergyman who lived two lives: a public one mired in darkness and a private one bathed in a beacon of light. Pew's stories are, for Silver, a map through her own particular darkness, into her own story and, finally, into love.
With Lighthousekeeping, Winterson begins a new cycle and a return to the lyrical intimacy of her earliest work. One of the most original and extraordinary writers of her generation, Winterson has created a modern fable about the transformative power of storytelling.

About this title

About the Authors

JEANETTE WINTERSON is the author of seven novels, a short-story collection, a book of essays, and most recently a children's picture book. She has won numerous awards, including the Whitbread First Novel Award, the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize, and the E. M. Forster Award. She lives in Oxfordshire and London.

JEANETTE WINTERSON is the author of seven novels, a short-story collection, a book of essays, and most recently a children's picture book. She has won numerous awards, including the Whitbread First Novel Award, the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize, and the E. M. Forster Award. She lives in Oxfordshire and London.

Reviews

Jeanette Winterson's new novel, Lighthousekeeping (Harcourt, $23), is a book of opposites. One of the main characters is a preacher, Babel Dark, who lives a double life in another town as Babel Lux (light). The lighthouse keeper, who illuminates the sea for passing sailors, is blind. Even the epigraph puts this into relief, with two quotations: "Remember you must die" (Muriel Spark) and "Remember you must live" (Ali Smith). At times, this structure of opposites seems contrived and heavy, but then Winterson writes a sentence that floats off the page, and you read on.

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.

It's hard to believe that Winterson's latest novel is even more lightweight than her previous one, The PowerBook, but here an orphan's romantic memories of growing up in a Scottish lighthouse are stretched to the limit with coy aphorisms. When her mother is blown away - literally possible on the savage Atlantic coast of Salts, Scotland - young Silver is sent to live with the lighthouse keeper at Cape Wrath, kind blind old Pew, who spins yarns, especially one about an early minister of Salts, Babel Dark, a Jekyll-and-Hyde type who's acquainted with contemporaries Darwin and Robert Louis Stevenson, and who cruelly betrays the woman he loves twice. When Silver grows up, Pew is discharged from his lighthouse duties in the name of progress, and trusty Silver sets off to look for him, ending up in Capri obsessed with a talking bird. Winterson attempts several stories within stories, switching narrators frequently, and relies heavily on the metaphor of storytelling as elucidation. While Dark's hubris is duly gothic, and the fondness between Silver and Pew touching, the narrative overall feels weightless, without cohesion or fixed purpose. Some of Winterson's off-kilter reflections on love and storytelling are striking, but too many have become convenient truisms: "A beginning, a middle and an end is the proper way to tell a story. But I have difficulty with that method."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In her sea-soaked and hypnotic eighth novel, Winterson turns the tale of an orphaned young girl and a blind old man into a fable about love and the power of storytelling. Silver, abandoned after the death of her mother in the Scottish town of Salts—a "rock-bitten, sand-edged shell of a town"—is taken in by Pew, a yarn-spinning lighthouse keeper "as old as a unicorn." In the darkness of the lighthouse, he tells never-ending stories about the tortured life of a nineteenth-century clergyman, formerly a minister in Salts, and gradually, it seems, Silver contributes stories of her own. Atmospheric and elusive, Winterson's high-modernist excursion is an inspired meditation on myth and language.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0151011176
• ISBN 13: 9780151011179
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 232