Lighthousekeeping

By Jeanette Winterson

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
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 3, 2006
• ISBN: 9780547541488

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester in 1959. She read English at Oxford University before writing her first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, which was published in 1985.

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Copyright © Jeanette Winterson 2004

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First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Winterson, Jeanette, 1959–

Lighthousekeeping/Jeanette Winterson.—1st U.S. ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-15-101117-6

1. Lighthouse keepers—Fiction. 2. Storytelling—Fiction. 3. Young women—Fiction. 4. Older men—Fiction. 5. Clergy—Fiction. 6. Blind—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6073.I558L54 2004

823'.914—dc22 2004017423

eISBN 978-0-547-54148-8

v2.0616

For Deborah Warner

Thank you very much to Caroline Michel and Marcella Edwards and everyone at HarperPress. And to Philippa Brewster, Henri Llewelyn Davies, Rachel Holmes and Zoe Silver.

‘Remember you must die’

MURIEL SPARK

‘Remember you must live’

ALI SMITH

Two Atlantics

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

I have no father. There’s nothing unusual about that—even children who do have fathers are often surprised to see them. My own father came out of the sea and went back that way. He was crew on a fishing boat that harboured with us one night when the waves were crashing like dark glass. His splintered hull shored him for long enough to drop anchor inside my mother.

Shoals of babies vied for life.

I won.

I lived in a house cut steep into the bank. The chairs had to be nailed to the floor, and we were never allowed to eat spaghetti. We ate food that stuck to the plate—shepherd’s pie, goulash, risotto, scrambled egg. We tried peas once—what a disaster—and sometimes we still find them, dusty and green in the corners of the room.

Some people are raised on a hill, others in the valley. Most of us are brought up on the flat. I came at life at an angle, and that’s how I’ve lived ever since.

At night my mother tucked me into a hammock slung cross-wise against the slope. In the gentle sway of the night, I dreamed of a place where I wouldn’t be fighting gravity with my own body weight. My mother and I had to rope us together like a pair of climbers, just to achieve our own front door. One slip, and we’d be on the railway line with the rabbits.

‘You’re not an outgoing type,’ she said to me, though this may have had much to do with the fact that going out was such a struggle. While other children were bid farewell with a casual, ‘Have you remembered your gloves?’ I got, ‘Did you do up all the buckles on your safety harness?’

Why didn’t we move house?

My mother was a single parent and she had conceived out of wedlock. There had been no lock on her door that night when my father came to call. So she was sent up the hill, away from the town, with the curious result that she looked down on it.

Salts. My home town. A sea-flung, rock-bitten, sand-edged shell of a town. Oh, and a lighthouse.

They say you can tell something of a person’s life by observing their body. This is certainly true of my dog. My dog has back legs shorter than his front legs, on account of always digging in at one end, and always scrambling up at the other. On ground level he walks with a kind of bounce that adds to his cheerfulness. He doesn’t know that other dogs’ legs are the same length all the way round. If he thinks at all, he thinks that every dog is like him, and so he suffers none of the morbid introspection of the human race, which notes every curve from the norm with fear or punishment.

‘You’re not like other children,’ said my mother. ‘And if you can’t survive in this world, you had better make a world of your own.’

The eccentricities she described as mine were really her own. She was the one who hated going out. She was the one who couldn’t live in the world she had been given. She longed for me to be free, and did everything she could to make sure it never happened.

We were strapped together like it or not. We were climbing partners.

And then she fell.

This is what happened.

The wind was strong enough to blow the fins off a fish. It was Shrove Tuesday, and we had been out to buy flour and eggs to make pancakes. At one time we kept our own hens, but the eggs rolled away, and we had the only hens in the world who had to hang on by their beaks while they tried to lay.

I was excited that day, because tossing pancakes was something you could do really well in our house—the steep slope under the oven turned the ritual of loosening and tossing into a kind of jazz. My mother danced while she cooked because she said it helped her to keep her balance.

Up she went, carrying the shopping, and pulling me behind her like an after-thought. Then some new thought must have clouded her mind, because she suddenly stopped and half-turned, and in that moment the wind blew like a shriek, and her own shriek was lost as she slipped.

In a minute she had dropped past me, and I was hanging on to one of our spiny shrubs—escallonia, I think it was, a salty shrub that could withstand the sea and the blast. I could feel its roots slowly lifting like a grave opening. I kicked the toes of my shoes into the sandy bank, but the ground wouldn’t give. We were both going to fall, falling away from the cliff face to a blacked-out world.

I couldn’t hang on any longer. My fingers were bleeding. Then, as I closed my eyes, ready to drop and drop, all the weight behind me seemed to lift. The bush stopped moving. I pulled myself up on it and scrambled behind it.

I looked down.

My mother had gone. The rope was idling against the rock. I pulled it towards me over my arm, shouting, ‘Mummy! Mummy!’

The rope came faster and faster, burning the top of my wrist as I coiled it next to me. Then the double buckle came. Then the harness. She had undone the harness to save me.

Ten years before I had pitched through space to find the channel of her body and come to earth. Now she had pitched through her own space, and I couldn’t follow her.

She was gone.

Salts has its own customs. When it was discovered that my mother was dead and I was alone, there was talk of what to do with me. I had no relatives and no father. I had no money left to me, and nothing to call my own but a sideways house and a skew-legged dog.

It was agreed by vote that the schoolteacher, Miss Pinch, would take charge of matters. She was used to dealing with children.

On my first dismal day by myself, Miss Pinch went with me to collect my things from the house. There wasn’t much—mainly dog bowls and dog biscuits and a Collins World Atlas. I wanted to take some of my mother’s things too, but Miss Pinch thought it unwise, though she did not say why it was unwise, or why being wise would make anything better. Then she locked the door behind us, and dropped the key into her coffin-shaped handbag.

‘It will be returned to you when you are twenty-one,’ she said. She always spoke like an Insurance Policy.

‘Where am I going to live until then?’

‘I shall make enquiries,’ said Miss Pinch. ‘You may spend tonight with me at Railings Row.’

Railings Row was a terrace of houses set back from the road. They reared up, black-bricked and salt-stained, their paint peeling, their brass green. They had once been the houses of prosperous tradesmen, but it was a long time since anybody had prospered in Salts, and now all the houses were boarded up.

Miss Pinch’s house was boarded up too, because she said she didn’t want to attract burglars.

She dragged open the rain-soaked marine-ply that was hinged over the front door, and undid the triple locks that secured the main door. Then she let us in to a gloomy hallway, and bolted and barred the door behind her.

We went into her kitchen, and without asking me if I wanted to eat, she put a plate of pickled herrings in front of me, while she fried herself an egg. We ate in complete silence.

‘Sleep here,’ she said, when the meal was done. She placed two kitchen chairs end to end, with a cushion on one of them. Then she got an eiderdown out of the cupboard—one of those eiderdowns that have more feathers on the outside than on the inside, and one of those eiderdowns that were only stuffed with one duck. This one had the whole duck in there I think, judging from the lumps.

So I lay down under the duck feathers and duck feet and duck bill and glassy duck eyes and snooked duck tail, and waited for daylight.

We are lucky, even the worst of us, because daylight comes.

The only thing for it was to advertise.

Miss Pinch wrote out all my details on a big piece of paper, and put it up on the Parish notice board. I was free to any caring owner, whose good credentials would be carefully vetted by the Parish Council.

I went to read the notice. It was raining, and there was nobody about. There was nothing on the notice about my dog, so I wrote a description of my own, and pinned it underneath:

ONE DOG. BROWN AND WHITE ROUGH COATED TERRIER. FRONT LEGS 8 INCHES LONG. BACK LEGS 6 INCHES LONG. CANNOT BE SEPARATED.

Then I worried in case a person might mistake it was the dog’s legs that could not be separated, instead of him and me.

‘You can’t force that dog on anybody,’ said Miss Pinch, standing behind me, her long body folded like an umbrella.

‘He’s my dog.’

‘Yes, but whose are you? That we don’t know, and not everybody likes dogs.’

Miss Pinch was a direct descendent

Reviews for Lighthousekeeping

[wordsampersand · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

What's most frustrating about this book, I think, is how the language dips between breezy, fluid prose and forced, clunky passages. I love how Winterson segments the narrative (or partial narrative, really), but there were spots that I just groaned and groaned.

[cariola_6 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I tried to read one of Janette Winterson's books several years ago but gave up on it. It leaned towards magical realism, a genre I'm not fond of, and I gave up on it. Still, I decided to give this little book a chance, and I'm vert glad that I did. I rarely reread books, but I think I'll be returning to 'Lighthousekeeping.'Outcast from the Scottish town of Salts after becoming pregnant out of wedlock, a woman and her daughter Silver move into an unstable house cut into the side of the rocky coast. When an accident leaves Silver orphaned, the only person willing to take her in is Pew, the blind, elderly lighthouse keeper. There have always been Pews keeping this lighthouse, he tells her, and Pew plans for Silver to take over when he passes on. The two of them bond over Pew's wonderful stories of his ancestors and of Babel Dark, minister and son of a town founder who led a mysterious double life. Among the "real" persons who inhabit the stories are Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Darwin. Pew claims that both visited his lighthouse, and their meetings with Babel Dark both opened possibilities and created conflicts within him. When circumstances force Silver to set out on her own, she becomes a storyteller as well.Winterson's writing is beautiful, often magical, and the interwoven plots are both quiet and compelling. She injects a measure of philosophy into her tale--something I find that most writers botch with heavy handedness, but her touch is light and therefore all the more effective. It's only near the end of the book that you realize how many themes she has managed to explore: the nature and origin of man, our relationship to God (if there is one), the enduring need for love, the importance of personal history and personal myths, the value of storytelling as a connection between people both past and present, and much, much more. 'Lighthousekeeping' is a short novel with a long and wide-ranging impact. Don't miss it!

[clarerhoden · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I wanted to love this book more. Perhaps I shouldn't have approached it with the expectation of a story, because it reads better as a fanstastical poem. The language is extraordinarily beautiful, as one would expect with Winterson.
I found the stop-start nature of the multiple layers of stories quite distracting. It was like watching those films with multiple screens going at the one time. I find that I want to become involved in a story, or even in several stories, but this particular choppy presentation didn't allow me to completely invest in any of the stories on offer.
It's quite a feat, but ultimately unsatisfying for me. Others absolutely love it, and it is definitely worth trying.

[auntie0nanuuq · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Rather odd & yet lyrical writing.

Silver was born of a father from the sea and orphaned early on. Silver & his dog are sent to live in the lighthouse with Old Pew, who is blind.... Eventually Pew opens up and tells the stories of the lighthouse & its founder that have been stored away in his memory.

[daland_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fair plot yet awesome prose. Worth the read.

[chicjohn · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Lyrical tale

[lysne · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

How beautiful. This is just what I needed to read today. I have to go back and read the last few pages again. so many lines that just resonated with me.

[shanaqui_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Second book of the readathon! I love Jeanette Winterson's writing, but I just don't love her books. Does that make any sense? I love the way she uses words, the ebb and flow of her prose, but it never becomes a satisfying whole for me. I think I find it easier to accept, the more I read of her stuff, but I'm still not quite there yet.

I never know what to say about her work because of it. I loved the beginning of this, and the story within the story about Babel Dark, but I don't think it was satisfying in the end. Still, if you like Jeanette Winterson's work, this is very similar to her usual style.

Oh, and I did like the Tristan and Isolde segment.

[librarybrandy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The plot is... well, indescribable, in its way. It's not surreal (exactly) and it's not fantastic (as in, of fantasy), and it's not fully realistic. But the plot hardly seems the point. It's a romance (though not of the heaving bosom variety), and it's so beautifully written that nothing seems to matter beyond the language.

[pocketmermaid · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was one of those books where there were two stories going at once and I really only preferred one of them. I loved reading about the orphaned Silver who found herself thrown into a life of lighthouse apprenticeship .But my eyes sort of glazed over whenever I had to jump back in time to the 19th century to read about Dark/Lux. I expected a lot more from this because Winterson is a fabulous writer, but when it was good it was REALLY good. The unevenness just made it so-so for me.

[whybehave2002 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Almost done with this...I've read the reviews of others who love it and others that love the author. I find it to be a very easy/quick read but the book jumps around a lot and I feel as if I am not getting a chance to know the characters or grow attached to them the way I like to in most books. It is poetic in it's own way but I'm waiting for the end so I can suddenly say ahhh that was worth the time it took to read. (I hope)

[hemlokgang · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a story about stories and the role they play in life and in love. Beautifully written...lyrical......oh to be named Silver, "part precious metal part pirate." A unique and wonderful journey.

[minaisham · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

-- Silver is an orphan who lives with blind Mr. Pew in a lighthouse. He tells her stories about the history of Cape Wrath & its founder, a 19th century clergyman. LIGHTHOUSEKEEPING unfolds in present, past, & future. Babel Dark & Miss Pinch are interesting names as well as characters. The author compares life to ocean. LIGHTHOUSEKEEPING is like a beach vacation without sand in bathing suit. I looked forward to reading it. Chapters are short. --

[startingover_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I must confess that I have struggled with some of Winterson's novels and didn't enjoy The Powerbook. Lighthousekeeping seems to me a much more satisfying and successful novel. Her prose has always been seductive and beautifully modulated, and it comes as no surprise to read in the 'About the Author' section featured in my paperback edition of the novel that 'Poetry is the thing that matters [to her] more than anything else'. Occasionally I felt a little overwhelmed by the weight of her admittedly lovely similes - 'pulling me behind her like an after-thought', 'the wind blew like a shriek', 'his eyes like a faraway ship'.The narrator of the story, Silver, was born in 1959. At the age of 10, having never known her father, she is orphaned when her mother is swept off a cliff. Her teacher, the aptly named Miss Pinch, apprentices Silver to the lighthouse keeper, blind Mr Pew. Silver's story runs parallel with that of Babel Dark, a 19th century preacher who falls in love with a girl called Molly. Already (unhappily) married, Dark lives a double life. When he's with Molly, he calls himself Lux.When the lighthouse is automated, Pew and Silver must leave the lighthouse. Silver wanders the world, searching for meaning and love, carrying with her Pew's legacy, the gift for storytelling. There is actually far more to the novel than this - it is a multi-layered, slippery narrative. Love, as so often in Winterson's work, 'wins the day', but what remains with me is Winterson's belief that 'storytelling is a way of navigating our lives'. For me at any rate, this novel is Winterson's richest novel to date.[September 2006]

[nocto_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I've never read Winterson before but I can't resist a lighthouse. And this was fascinating; very sparse and well written with a deceptively detailed storyline. Definitely someone I'll read more of.

[brokensnowpea_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Winterson never ceases to amaze me with her storytelling and power over words. This novel is elegant, grisly, and haunting.

[wandering_star_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Silver, an orphan girl, is apprenticed to Mr Pew the lighthousekeeper. Pew, blind and ancient, is a great teller of stories about the village's history. His tales focus on Babel Dark, a Victorian priest with a mysterious double life, who is unnerved by his discussions with Darwin (and discovery of a cave of fossils) and may have inspired Robert Louis Stevenson's most famous creation(s). At some point, round about the time that the decision is made to automate the lighthouse, the reader realises that the stories are actually about the many layers of our pasts, our lives, our various stories - and above all, the way that love both creates, and is built of, layers of memories.I started out thinking that this could be described as magical realism, but actually it's more like poetry - a flood of metaphors and interlinked ideas, sometimes elliptical.Sample: You were chopping vegetables and telling me about a day in Thailand when you had seen turtles hatch in the sand. Not many of them make it to the sea, and once there, the sharks are waiting for them. Days disappear and get swallowed up much like that, but the ones like these, the ones that make it, swim out and return for the rest of your life. Thank you for making me happy.

[ajbraithwaite_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Really liked this book, written as series of little stories, shedding illumination onto parts of the life of the narrator, Silver. The reflections on the way humans carry their stories with them, the nature of memory and the changeability of life all struck me as interesting and thoughtful.

[the_awesome_opossum · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Lighthousekeeping is a simple and elegant story about a girl named Silver, who is orphaned and taken in by Pew, who maintains a lighthouse off the coast of Scotland. Weaved throughout the story is another about Babel Dark, a minister from the 1800s who saw the beginning of the lighthouse, and struggled with the changes the future was bringing; there are extensive portions dedicated to Darwin, and to Jekyll and Hyde. Winterson writes about the power of storytelling, and the beauty in nature against an increasingly automated world

[msjoanna · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is actually the first Winterson book I've read (though I've had Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit on my TBR shelf longer). I really enjoyed the quality of the writing and I read this book almost all the way through in one sitting. The elliptical narration and the interweaving of storylines was compelling and I became quite involved in the story. This book has gotten lukewarm reviews, but I think expectations are set high for this author -- many reviews say something like, "well, not her best work, but pretty good." I'll definitely need to read more by this author soon.

[booksmitten · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In "Lighthousekeeping," Jeanette Winterson returns to the spry wit ofher earliest works and yet brings with her the language and precisionof a more seasoned writer. With the tale of blind Mr. Pew, who haskept the Cape Wrath lighthouse for as long as anyone can remember, andSilver, who is orphaned and has nowhere else to go, Winterson remindsus of the importance of preserving one's history through the tellingof stories. And it has one of the best opening paragraphs I've seen inyears.

[terena_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Jeanette's usual beautiful prose, but th plot of this novel was not as strong.

[paisley1974 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This novel valiantly weaves in several timelines that all related to the keepers of a particular lighthouse. In that respect, it came off as being a little too "literary"--imagery of blindness combined with the ideas of stories being lighthouses. I could see writing a paper about this book.For me, my favorite novels are those that are character driven, and here, the characters were more literary devices than people.

[dancingwaves · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not one of her best, but well done. I enjoyed the beautiful language that Winterson brings to all of her novels.

[391_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I'm a pretty big fan of Winterson's work, but this book really did very little for me. I didn't enjoy Dark's story, and I thought Silver's was severely underdeveloped. The ending was much, much better than the first half of the book, but it felt tacked on and didn't flow well. Overall, I don't think this is one of her best books. Personally, I enjoyed "The Powerbook" a lot more.

[jscape2000 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Unparalleled. The only author I can compare to Jeanette Winterson is Jeanette Winterson. She meets Borges and Garcia Marquez and Rhys and Kingsolver at a nexus of magic and pathos, and she bests them all.