Review By: Crusader Hillis
Jeanette Winterson’s latest novel is an evocative exploration of the limitations of language and meaning. In it, Winterson returns to familiar territory, reprising her preoccupation with time and her fascination with the human heart. Its main character, Silver, is a young girl orphaned at the age of ten, who is then apprenticed to a blind lighthouse-keeper, Mr Pew. Set in the seaside Scottish town of Salts, the place Silver inhabits moves into magic realism, always seeking to reveal the truth of Silver’s situation rather than verifiable physical facts. Lighthousekeeping is playful, engaging and tantalising, and is buoyed with serious philosophical insights and deadpan humour.Life with Mr Pew opens Silver to the limitless possibilities of life. An inveterate storyteller, he weaves Silver a multihued tale that goes back two centuries, crossing and re-crossing timeframes and family histories, which are then reworked into Silver’s story of her own life. At the heart of Pew’s story is Babel Dark, the 19th-century clergyman who, according to Winterson’s story, is the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. His story is bound up in the history of the lighthouse, and the sad emotional triangle he inhabits with his own wife and the mother of his illegitimate children (the love of his life) is a twisted, moving and dark tale of longing and passion. Loss pervades Winterson’s novel, which Silver reacts to by constantly moving on. When Pew and Silver’s dog, Little Jim, disappear into the fog one day, Silver moves to an English town and becomes a drifter. Her tale then becomes a series of vignettes that describes her love for a woman and her travels in the world. Through it all, Pew’s story of Babel Dark recurs as a dark motif, revealing the power and limitations of romantic love seen through a lens of history. The novel is full of literary allusions – from the medieval world of Tristan and Isolde to the gothic, to romantics and modernists – all used to tease out Winterson’s many literary concerns: the faces of love, the forces of history and the unfathomable power of a story. In a passage that neatly sums all of this up, she writes:
“Some people say that the best stories have no words. They weren’t brought up on Lighthousekeeping. It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in locked tongues. 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. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.
|
