lighthousekeeping
by Jeanette Winterson
(Fourth Estate)
In lighthousekeeping Jeanette Winterson returns with some of the whimsical energy to be found in her earlier novels, like Written on the Body and Sexing the Cherry, but she seems to have lost that fearless spontaneity and experimental tenacity for which she has become a highly acclaimed writer of postmodern fiction.
Part love story, part fairy tale, lighthousekeeping offers an award-winning writer’s trademark practice of re-mystifying conventional notions of love, life, the universe and everything. Whereas her last novel, The Power Book, was flat and lifeless, with Winterson relying on well-hashed formulae, in this offering there are flashes of her erstwhile brilliance and moments of characteristic poetic charge.
Among the few predictably quirky (if somewhat underdeveloped) characters in the new book is the stark and lonely Reverend Babel Dark, whose fossilised seahorse carries much of the symbolic weight of the narrative, signifying the power of memory and story in forming (and eroding) the layers of our lives.
Dark is a late-Victorian gentleman who is driven to lead a double life in order to save face in a society on the brink of extinction. His past, however, will not be erased and remains visibly etched, fossil-like, on the fabric of his life. Somewhere in the middle of falling in love and living a lie, he meets Charles Darwin and Robert Louis Stevenson, men whose stories form part of the inter-related web of discourses that surface in the novel.
“Born part precious metal, part pirate”, lighthousekeeping is narrated by a young girl called Silver, and examines the intricacies of love and loss in a world that has become mechanised and mundane. Before his vocation as lighthouse keeper is rendered redundant by modern technology, the blind old Mr Pew adopts Silver, passing on to her the art of lighthouse keeping. This involves not only the maintenance of a regular flash of light to warn off ships passing too close to the land, but the more necessary art of story-telling to ward off common human loneliness — those other ships passing in the night.
Pew remains too underdeveloped to carry any lasting impression, but his blindness allows him to “see” other things, things that conventional perspective forbids. And he teaches the young Silver a lesson or two about the limits of logic. In stories, says Pew, there is always a woman: “a princess, a witch, a stepmother, a mermaid, a fairy godmother or one as beautiful as she is good”. But in lighthousekeeping, as Pew reminds us, the list is incomplete — the missing woman being the one you love. The one Silver loves is just an outline in the text, coaxing the reader to flesh out the details, and in so doing, helping Winterson to re-energise the worn out phrase “I love you”.
There are some powerful moments in the novel and Winterson hasn’t completely lost her mastery of vivid imagery (“She had used her body as a grounding rod. She had tried to earth him. Instead she has split him”). And she continues to stage huge debates, in this case, the competing narratives of Biblical Genesis, Darwinian Science and Romantic Love vie for meta-status but it is the body that emerges all-knowing — “the measure of all things … the scale we know the best”.
Avid readers of Winterson will still enjoy this book, but may find something lacking. The dialogue is stilted, the descriptions superficial, the characterisation one-dimensional. To quote from an epigraph in the final section of the book, in effect, lighthousekeeping remains “part broken, part whole” and leaves the reader only partly satisfied.