Customer Reviews

Lighthousekeeping

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Jeanette Winterson's magnificently descriptive, impressionistic novel tells two interconnected stories, each of them asking who we are as humans, how we connect to the past, and what makes our lives worth living. Its modern story focuses on Silver, born in 1959, "part precious metal, part pirate." A young girl without a father, Silver is orphaned at ten and moves into the local lighthouse with Pew, the aged and blind lighthousekeeper, whose family has tended the light in northwest Scotland since 1828. There, she polishes the brasswork, makes the tea, and listens to Pew's stories, some of them historical and some more fanciful, but all of them filled with wisdom and lessons from the past.

The lighthouse, we learn through Pew's stories, was built by the father of Robert Louis Stevenson. In 1878, R. L. Stevenson comes to the lighthouse for a visit and is fascinated by the story of Babel Dark, a local preacher, who becomes the inspiration for Mr. Hyde in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dark, we learn through stories, falls in love with beautiful Molly in the early 1850s, then sees her embracing another man, becomes overcome with jealousy, and rejects her. Taking the symbolic name of Lux (meaning "light") when he is with Molly, Dark is unable to control his emotions and becomes a Hyde-like abuser. "He was dark...the light in him never lit."

As the stories of Silver (which reflects light) and Babel Dark develop in tandem, the novel takes on operatic qualities, with the two stories often sounding like duets, one voice light and one dark, singing in counterpoint to each other. As each person seeks fulfillment through love and connection, the cadence of Winterson's writing rises and falls, swirls, and turns in upon itself, with the same themes of creation, connection, and the continuity of life echoing throughout. Winterson's incorporation of the Tristan and Isolde story, along with the visit of Charles Darwin to the lighthouse, expands and further emphasizes the themes.

Both romantic and philosophical, Winterson offers much unique imagery. Pew, for example, is a "silent, taciturn clamp of a man." An Albanian family was "vacuum-packed into a ship," the grandmother, "all sun-dried tomato, tough, chewy, skin split with the heat." Her narrative tempo is flawless, the language elegant, and the characterization consistent with the themes. The end of the book harks back to the beginning, completing a circle and granting new insights into her meanings. A rich novel which the reader will want to read slowly and savor. Mary Whipple

This small novel is a journey of shared illusions, melding the past with myth, overflowing with images: the moodiness of the distant moon, the leaden weight of night, the soft damp mist that fills every crevice of this sea-swept land, a place of dreams and stories on the Scottish coast of the Atlantic Ocean. All is image, blurred pictures of people long dead, a reminder that the past is not so far away.

Silver is the narrator of Lighthousekeeping, her early life anchored to a seaward listing home that finally swallows her mother whole, a father never known. From the drab abode of Miss Pinch in the town of Salt, Silver is sent to live with old blind Pew, the lighthouse keeper of Cape Wrath, "home to gulls and dreams". Pew is a storyteller who teaches her the language of the sea and the soul, relating the tale of Babel Dark, a haunted figure, "not a man for good mornings and good nights", married to a woman devoid of curiosity, his wife nonetheless.

Silver's life is part mistake, part madness, a mélange of stories and impressions, anchored only by her affection for Pew and her security in the lighthouse. The pages are awash with vivid imagination, flying on the wings of language, the magic of myth, weaving stories like webs around the characters. Stories hover like shadows, shifting within the narrative, connected by a filament of truth, Silver's voice, Pew's memory, Dark's anguish and yearning for a life unlived, for years squandered.

Like a dark prince, Babel Dark, he who lived a century or more before, wanders the cliffs in Pew's telling, galloping over the rugged terrain, his heart as wild as the countryside, unredeemed. Like the heroes of myth, Dark's passion is romantic, if embittered, just as Pew's tales are true, though impossible. And Silver takes it all in until the stories course through her body like blood and she cannot live without this precious fluid that rushes through her veins. Even when she must reinvent herself again and again, Silver is buoyed by Pew's "lighthousekeeping" lessons, the stories that sustain the heart.

There are so many remarkable phrases, astute observations and insights that I read slowly, savoring the language, the ideas, evocative seafaring lore and doomed love, all reminders of the heart and its penchant for illogical attachments, for personalization. I gladly follow as Silver navigates through her days, from the mother swept away in the wind, the bed made of chairs at Miss Pinch's, the enchanted years at the lighthouse with blind Pew, Babel Dark's sad saga of unrequited love and sailors lost to a howling sea.

Myth, memory and language combine, orchestrated into a symphony on the edge of the world, where life and death coexist, entwined for eternity. This prose/poetry holds a wealth of images, the warmth of infinite tenderness, bright splashes of sunlight, quiet interludes of thoughtful introspection. Lighthousekeeping is a lesson in reinvention, subtle directions in living the story, listening to the past and welcoming the unknown, the future. Luan Gaines/2005.

Jeanette Winterson never ceases to speak to the very core of me. Lighthousekeeping is a novel that reminds me of her first, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, but completely unique in its own way.

Lighthousekeeping follows the story of orphan Silver as she moves from place to place, first to a lighthouse after her mother dies, from the lighthouse to a hotel, from the hotel to Capri, and from there to places that might only exist in her imagination. Silver is mentored by Pew, the old lighthousekeeper who tells her that stories are light and the only way to make sense of the world, to truly see. The notion of storytelling is at the center of this sweet, moving, and poetic novel.

Jeanette Winterson uses Lighthousekeeping as a playground for the notions of storytelling, light and dark, of personal history and factual history, of the way humans view themselves and their pasts, of the way others view them, of the way others perceive history, fictional and factual, and by the end of the book, she has even included the reader in her journey as a lover of stories. It is a beautiful and engaging and quite simply moved me to tears.

If you are looking for a linear, plot-driven novel, you may be disappointed. The beauty of this novel is in the patterning, the attention to language and theme and the notion of storytelling as a story in itself.

Silver is a girl born completely by chance. Her mother had a brief encounter with a sailor, leaving the penniless woman to raise the baby girl in a crooked house tipping into the sea. The house was so slanted that the family dog's legs grew irregularly and they couldn't eat any food that would roll away. Eventually Silver is taken by a hilariously prudish woman named Miss Pinch (a curiously Dickensian touch from an author who has spoken so condescendingly about the work of Sarah Waters) to live with a lighthouse keeper named Pew. From Pew she learns the art of story telling and consequently a way of finding value in her life. Because of her origins and social status Silver is viewed by people like Miss Pinch as worthless or an accident. Through the medium of story telling Silver is able to forge for herself an identity more true than any documented reality.

Interwoven with the tale of the novel's central character Silver, is the story of a priest named Babel Dark. He is a fascinatingly divided character, something Winterson has Robert Louise Stevenson cement in English literature. As always, the author's surreal nature of story telling melds with philosophical insights which have the ability to really turn our world upside down. Stunningly beautiful passages add depth to wonderfully quirky tales. Winterson always holds up the importance of storytelling in a way that is ceaselessly inventive and inspiring and makes you want to read on.

LIGHTHOUSEKEEPING by Jeanette Winterson is a saga of dualities, of dark and light, wind and sea, an old man leading a double life, a young girl having to start life over. I really like the book's beginning, at a cold lighthouse in northern Scotland with a swirling storm of images that duplicate the wind and sea and give us a definite sense of place. It's set in the late 20th century, but seems out of time -- it always seems ancient.

When the narrator, Silver, is orphaned, a family takes her in to teach her lighthousekeeping. Everything's dark except the lighthouse light, and all energy goes toward it. "Our business was light, but we lived in darkness," she says. Every lighthouse has a story, she's told, and as part of her training she has to learn them all. This is a story about storytelling, bringing light to illuminate the darkness, and names continue the metaphor: Silver reflects everything around her; one of the characters is named Dark, and when he takes on an alias, he names himself Lux or light.

Naturally, I identified with Silver's love for books. One of my favorite moments was her trip to the library, where an unfriendly librarian wouldn't let her take out books already reserved for other customers. Her clever solution: "I have a list of titles that I leave at the desk, because they are bound to be written some day, and it's best to be ahead of the queue."

The best way to describe the -- let me call it "structure," rather than "plot" -- is probably to use the narrator's own words: "This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in." She warns us that "a beginning, a middle and an end is the proper way to tell a story. But I have difficulty with that method." Several times the structure had me scratching my head, and I don't mind admitting that I was a little confused by the insertion of the story of Tristan and Isolde and the tale of a talking bird, seemingly thrown in like snapshots from a totally different book.

But it's good, and good literature reminds its readers of other important reads. The author admits that Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" resonates in her book. And parts of LIGHTHOUSEKEEPING, especially in the beginning, remind me of "Ahab's Wife" by Sena Jeter Naslund. I loved that one and strongly recommend it -- especially the first half, in which I was totally absorbed in her adventures at the lighthouse and riding high in the lookout perch of a whaling ship.

Winterson's writing is sensual and extraordinary, and it's absolute poetry. Here's an excerpt, with Silver thinking about Captain Scott in the Antarctic: "Not earth-bound any more, he could wing the dogs in a wind-ruff of fur, husky-haloed through two miles or so of gravity, then out, free, barking at the moon, half-wolf, half-tame, going home to the white planet he had seen shining in their orange eyes, paws hock-deep in snow." Holy cow, is that beautiful. Try reading it out loud.

The narrator explains, "The true things are too big or too small, or in any case always the wrong size to fit the template called language. I know that. But I know something else too, because I was brought up to Lighthousekeeping. Turn down the daily noise and at first there is the relief of silence. And then, very quietly, as quiet as light, meaning returns." Lovely.

In the bitter northern Scottish town of Salts, a young orphaned girl named Silver is thrust into the care of the hateful Miss Pinch. Silver is eventually taken in by Pew, a blind, yarn-spinning lighthouse keeper who regales her with never-ending stories about the tortured life of a nineteenth-century clergyman - Babel Dark, formerly a minister in Salts, and son of the Dark who built the lighthouse. As Silver matures and moves on, she takes the gift of storytelling with her to life in Bristol, in Europe, and finally in love ... Winterson's eighth novel is a departure from the cycle of fiction she's been steadily pursuing since the 1980s. Many readers will be surprised by its apparent simplicity, but behind the whimsy there is serious intent. Winterson's concern here is the power of storytelling. For her, there seems to be a certain strata of truth that transcends time and culture, a bedrock of human experiences - breaking away, first love, loss - that are best communicable through storytelling. Stories are how we make sense of our own lives, and the life of the species. Stories (art in general, even) form the authentic record of human experience, far more so than factual history. Fiction is truth in its most accessible form. "Lighthousekeeping" will quite likely appeal to students of literary studies, who will most appreciate the cunning interweaving of Jekyll and Hyde, Tristan and Isolde, ponderings on the Grand Narratives of Christianity and Darwinism, and Winterson's bold poetics and narrative structure. But general readers might find the insistent discussion of storytelling a little tedious, and wish that Winterson had simply told rather than self-consciously reflected so often on the telling. But through it all, there's still the thing that Winterson can always be relied on to give us: a powerful and shameless celebration of the agonies and ecstasies of romantic love.

Jeanette Winterson's, Lighthousekeeping is a richly imagined, highly stylized collection of memories, recollections, and stories. Jettisoning the traditional plot, Winterson weaves an emotional, intensely imagined tale that sweeps from the present into the past, and where love, time, and reality crash against the Cape Wrath lighthouse, "home to gulls and dreams," which for generations, has held steadfast on the most northwesterly tip of Scotland.

After the death of her mother, the 10-year-old fatherless Silver becomes an orphan. With no place to anchor, her teacher, Mrs. Pinch apprentices her to the enigmatic Pew, a blind old lighthouse keeper, who can miraculously see through all of time. Pew is a "rough shape of a human", an old man with "a bag of stories under his arm"; an unfathomable figure, "he was and he wasn't."

Initially fraught at losing all the things she knew and fretted over, Silver gradually learns to like the mysterious old man. As she cooks for him and helps with cleaning the various instruments, she begins to notice that there are days "when he could have evaporated into the spray, and days when he actually was the light house."

Pew tells her that if she really wants to be at "one" with the lighthouse, she must learn the lighthouse's stories, the brittle ghosts of the building's past, the stories that are "layered in time." For Pew, our past existence and the stories that we keep are like the flashes of light the lighthouse sends out to passing ships, a human connection in a world that is composed of both light and dark.

Pew tells Silver the story of Babel Dark, a nineteenth-century clergyman, who was named after the biblical tower. Dark, a secret bigamist has been living double life. Trapped in a loveless marriage, Dark is besotted by Molly, a red headed, passionate girl with whom he lives for only two months a year under the name of Lux. Dark is a living version of the lighthouse, a life troubled and distressed by the forces of night and day.

Dark is desperately in love with Molly, but he can't give her the total commitment she so desperately wants. Thus his life is fraught with turmoil and disorder. Silver, as she grows older, begins to realize that like Babel Dark, her life is also a trail of shipwrecks and set-sails. No arrivals, no destinations, "another boat, another ride." And she ponders what it was like to be lost and alone a hundred and fifty years ago.

Through these parallel lives, Winterson is saying that life is often fraught with chance. We meet, we don't meet, and we take the wrong turning, "and still bump into one another." Sometimes we even "conscientiously" choose the right road but it leads nowhere. But amongst all this chaos is love. Love is eternal, a force of nature, "as strong as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, and as gigantic." When it burns out the planet (and we) die.

In sparse, but beautiful language the author paints a portrait of humanity that is eternally restless, and like the solidity of the lighthouse, we yearn for a stable world without volatility, precariousness, and inexplicableness.

Silver, stripped of the bright security of the lighthouse, wanders the world in search of meaning, stealing a book and bird that she believes might hold enlightenment. Dark's ending is tragedy, as he suspends his mistrust in Molly and professes his love too late.

Silver survives and finds true love because she accepts the enigmatic true state of human nature, and carries with her the gift of storytelling that Pew was ultimately able to bestow on her. Mike Leonard June 05.

With LIGHTHOUSEKEEPING, Jeannette Winterson has written another wonderful love story, woven among historical possibilities in the lives of such as Charles Darwin, Robert Louis Stephenson, Richard Wagner, among other historical figures. The integrity of the story is held together with nautical themes, the greatest being the lighthouse.

What I have long been interested with Winterson's work is her beautiful prose that has been delicately transplanted to a contemporary format. Her imagery and diction generally stopped being produced with the literary masters from the nineteenth century, and this may be why her plots often return to those days, yet Winterson's style is not in the least antiquated.

If you are a fan of Winterson's body of work then you will surely enjoy LIGHTHOUSEKEEPING, as it is a striking variation of previous efforts, but Winterson through and through. To anyone unfamiliar with Winterson, and interested in a highly polished hybridization of romance and soft-eroticism, I highly recommend LIGHTHOUSEKEEPING as a first soirée.

Jeannette Winterson's Lighthousekeeping interlaces several stories, that of Silver, blind Pew and Babel Dark as well as several historical figures in a tale that is much more then a story with a beginning, middle and end, but a tale that deals with the essence of story telling. Winterson weaves webs of stories within stories and several of her characters like that of Pew and Babel Dark are highly addictive. These webs of stories give the reader a chance to question the nature of love, life and what makes a story. This is not a typical read, this is a novel that steps beyond plot conventions.

Silver, the girlchild of an unwed mother and a seaman grows up on the seacliffs overlooking the fishing town of Salts in a house perched so precariously that all the furniture has to be nailed down and Silver and her mother have to rope themselves together to keep from falling to their deaths. Even their dog evolves deformed legs to navigate the steeply leaning floor! When her mother dies in an accident, Silver is apprenticed to an old lighthousekeeper named Pew, and begins to learn not only the beauty of this simple but important job, but also a little of the history of the family that built it. What follows are interlocking and parallel narratives of Silver's urge to find the meaning of her life and that of Babel Dark, friend of Darwin and Robert Louis Stevenson, who lived a double life while serving as the town's clergyman.

Lighthousekeeping is a nice book that recalls not only classic literature but also allows Winterson to use her penchant for creating half-real neverlands that somehow find solid ground in the real world. Many aspects of this novel are fairytale-like and the interweaving of historical personages and the connection of names to Treasure Island lend it an even more dream-like quality that recalls poetry more than prose. In some of Winterson's other works, her pseudo-gravitas is invested too much in the lyrical nature of her words to the detriment of the storytelling. But Lighthousekeeping is a rousing success. A good book.