It is through telling stories that Silver learns to cling to life, such as the sailor lost at sea does by spending his time adrift narrating his own life in a way that he transcends the self and becomes a story that can survive the elements. ‘ Every light had a story-no, every light was a story, and the flashes themselves were the stories going out over the waves, as markers and guides and comfort and warning.’ The stories themselves make the meaning.’ Only small bits of a life are revealed, but done so in a way that assumes a sweeping epic of existence, one that feels empathetic and instructive, such as the lessons learned from Pew’s stories of Babel Dark inform Silver in her own life. ‘ The stories I want to tell you will light up part of my life, and leave the rest in darkness,’ Silver says, ‘ You don’t need to know everything. But I have difficulty with that method,’ Silver tells us, and the narrative comes from all angles of stories punctuating stories with other stories that map out meaning like constellations where each star is a different moment in a life. ‘ A beginning, a middle and an end is the proper way to tell a story. As is to be expected in Winterson-land, the novel shifts across time and I was frequently reminded of the rejection of linear time and the boisterous humor and historical settings of Sexing the Cherry, the novel that feels closest to Lighthousekeeping.
Lighthousekeeping is an expression of this existential narrative towards meaning and the novel is structured in a way that reflects that. This idea was studied in a 1944 experiment where students were shown an abstract video of moving geometric shapes: most responses to it defined it in terms of a narrative, ascribing emotions and purpose to the images on the screen. ‘ We tell ourselves stories in order to live,’ wrote Joan Didion, ‘ we look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.’ Human’s create narratives from our lives like an existential search for meaning. Told through a cavalcade of stories that crash into each other like waves at sea, Winterson nests the life story of Babel Dark-a preacher caught in a dual existence of light and darkness-into the story of Silver and, though elegant language and intertextuality, crafts a tale that serves as a testament to the lasting power of storytelling.
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Pew teaches her how to ‘ keep the light,’ in which we see the lighthouse not only functions to keep ships from being dashed upon the rocks but that the stories told there keep lives from running aground as well. Central to the novel is the lighthouse, a dynamic metaphor of stability and a ‘ known point in darkness,’ where a young orphan named Silver lives with Pew, the blind lighthouse keeper of indeterminate (or maybe impossible) age. This novel gripped me from the very start and is certainly a favorite read of the year for the remarkable blend of prose, whimsy and chaotic brilliance that recalls Winterson’s early work but stands alone as a remarkable achievement. ‘ If you tell yourself like a story,’ the narrator is told in Lighthousekeeping, ‘ it doesn’t seem so bad.’ Storytelling is a defining aspect of humanity, an act that connects us, passes on history, interprets culture and helps us process existence, and here Jeanette Winterson turns their own masterful storytelling toward creating a moving and postmodern ode to the lasting power of storytelling. Winterson lives in Gloucestershire and London. Her radio drama includes the play Text Message, broadcast by BBC Radio in November 2001. She is a regular contributor of reviews and articles to many newspapers and journals and has a regular column published in The Guardian.
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She is editor of a series of new editions of novels by Virginia Woolf published in the UK by Vintage. She adapted Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for BBC television in 1990 and also wrote "Great Moments in Aviation," a television screenplay directed by Beeban Kidron for BBC2 in 1994. One of the most original voices in British fiction to emerge during the 1980s, Winterson was named as one of the 20 "Best of Young British Writers" in a promotion run jointly between the literary magazine Granta and the Book Marketing Council. She graduated from St Catherine's College, Oxford, and moved to London where she worked as an assistant editor at Pandora Press. Her strict Pentecostal Evangelist upbringing provides the background to her acclaimed first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published in 1985. She was adopted and brought up in Accrington, Lancashire, in the north of England. Novelist Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959.
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