Lighthousekeeping
-
-
3.7 • 11 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
An orphaned girl is held spellbound by the tales of a lighthouse keeper on the Scottish coast, in a novel by the Costa Award-winning author of The Passion.
After her mother is literally swept away by the savage winds off the Atlantic coast of Salts, Scotland, never to be seen again, the orphaned Silver is feeling particularly unmoored. Taken in by the mysterious keeper of a lighthouse on Cape Wrath, Silver finds an anchor in Mr. Pew—blind, as old and legendary as a unicorn, and a yarn spinner of persuasive power.
The tale he has to tell Silver is that of a nineteenth-century clergyman named Babel Dark, whose life was divided between a loving light and a mask of deceit. Peopled with such luminaries as Charles Darwin and Robert Louis Stevenson, Mr. Pew’s story within a story within a story soon unfolds like a map. It’s one that Silver must follow if she’s to be led through her own darkness, and to find her own meaning in life, in this novel by a winner of the Costa, Lambda, and E.M. Forster Awards, the author of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit; Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and other acclaimed works.
“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…Atmospheric and elusive, Winterson's high-modernist excursion is an inspired meditation on myth and language.”—The New Yorker
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A starred review indicates a book of outstanding quality. A review with a blue-tinted title indicates a book of unusual commercial interest that hasn't received a starred review.LIGHTHOUSEKEEPINGJeanette Winterson. Harcourt, $23 (240p) 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."
