The Books: “Lighthousekeeping” (Jeanette Winterson)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Lighthousekeeping, by Jeanette Winterson.

After about a decade of reading books by Winterson that were a bit of a yawn, I tore through Lighthousekeeping like a crazy person. I read it WAY too fast … much of it was lost to me … But I couldn’t contain myself. I was so excited. Here was a story that WASN’T the story of a love triangle (man, woman, redheaded woman) … it was something different altogether. It did not (on the whole) get good reviews, and many of the criticisms are ones I have made myself. There is something repetitive about Winterson’s work. She only has a couple of themes, and she keeps hashing them out. She is not, say, John Irving, or Annie Proulx – people who are interested in creating other human beings. Winterson doesn’t do that. When she’s at her best, she creates other memorable worlds and realities, set-pieces that stick in the brain and imagination. When she’s at her worst, she drones on and on in overly poetic prose that can’t ever be pinned down. Her books can feel like upended poems, fragments of verse – clipped together. It can be quite tiresome. Don’t be mistaken: I don’t look for Winterson to write a big novel like John Irving does, or Michael Chabon. That’s not her thing. But sometimes I read her stuff and I wonder what it must have been like to have success come so early. To hit it as huge as Winterson did, so early on. Maybe she really does only have one story to tell. Who knows.

But I found Lighthousekeeping to be captivating. Here’s the stunner of an opener, classic Winterson:

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.

I don’t know, I think that’s pretty damn marvelous.

The orphaned girl of Lighthousekeeping is named Silver (same name as the heroine in Tanglewreck – excerpt here … See, that’s what I mean about the same-ness of Winterson’s work … she even repeats lines from story to story … and it doesn’t seem just like a personal lexicon. It sometimes feels like she has run out of invention. To me, “what you risk reveals what you value” BELONGS in The Passion (excerpt here), where it first appeared. It probably appears in 5 out of 6 of her books after that. Like: no, Jeanette! Don’t do that! You’re weakening it!!) Sorry, tangent: Silver is orphaned. She goes to live with a blind man named Mr. Pew who keeps a lighthouse. Mr. Pew tells the little girl stories of a man named Babel Dark, an 19th century clergyman – and the story flows back and forth from the present-day at the lighthouse (which never feels like the present-day – it is a grim and bleak existence) back to the mid 1800s when Babel Dark lived. Babel Dark’s journey becomes intertwined with Silver’s, and – as usual – we aren’t sure what is “real” and what is imagined.

I really liked the book. I liked the worlds she presented to me. I love the house built into the cliff, where groceries fall out of the cupboards, and Silver has to be strapped into her hammock so she won’t fall out and go plummeting down the house. I just love stuff like that. It truly IS inventive.

But please, Jeanette: no more “what you risk reveals what you value”, okay? You said it once and it really meant something. It still does. Just let it be!!

Here’s an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Lighthousekeeping, by Jeanette Winterson.

The Pews have been lighthousekeepers at Cape Wrath since the day of the birth. The job was passed down generation to generation, though the present Mr. Pew has the look of being there forever. He is as old as a unicorn, and people are frightened of him because he isn’t like them. Like and like go together. Likeness is liking, whatever they say about opposites.

But some people are different, that’s all.

I look like my dog. I have a pointy nose and curly hair. My front legs – that is, my arms, are shorter than my back legs – that is, my legs, which makes a symmetry with my dog, who is just the same, but the other way round.

His name’s DogJim.

I put up a photo of him next to mine on the notice board, and I hid behind a bush while they all came by and read our particulars. They were all sorry, but they all shook their heads and said, ‘Well, what could we do with her?’

It seemed that nobody could think of a use for me, and when I went back to the notice board to add something encouraging, I found I couldn’t think of a use for myself.

Feeling dejected, I took the dog and went walking, walking, walking along the cliff headland towards the lighthouse.

Miss Pinch was a great one for geography – even though she had never left Salts in her whole life. The way she described the world, you wouldn’t want to visit it anyway. I recited to myself what she had taught us about the Atlantic Ocean …

The Atlantic is a dangerous and unpredictable ocean. It is the second largest ocean in the world, extending in an S shape from the Arctic to the Antarctic regions, bounded by North and South America in the West, and Europe and Africa in the East.

The North Atlantic is divided from the South Atlantic by the equatorial counter-current. At the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, heavy fogs form where the warm Gulf Stream meets the cold Labrador Current. In the North Western Ocean, icebergs are a threat from May to December.

Dangerous. Unpredictable. Threat.

The world according to Miss Pinch.

But, on the coasts and outcrops of this treacherous ocean, a string of lights was built over 300 years.

Look at this one. Made of granite, as hard and unchanging as the sea is fluid and volatile. The sea moves constantly, the lighthouse, never. There is no sway, no rocking, none of the motion of ships and ocean.

Pew was staring out of the rain-battered glass; a silent taciturn clamp of a man.

Some days later, as we were eating breakfast in Railings Row – me, toast without butter, Miss Pinch, kippers and tea – Miss Pinch told me to wash and dress quickly and be ready with all my things.

‘Am I going home?’

‘Of course not – you have no home.’

‘But I’m not staying here?’

‘No. My house is not suitable for children.’

You had to respect Miss Pinch – she never lied.

‘Then what is going to happen to me?’

‘Mr Pew has put in a proposal. He will apprentice you to lighthousekeeping.’

‘What will I have to do?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘If I don’t like it, can I come back?’

‘No.’

‘Can I take DogJim?’

‘Yes.’

She hated saying yes. She was of those people for whom yes is always an admission of guilt or failure. No was power.

A few hours later, I was standing on the windblown jetty, waiting for Pew to collect me in his patched and tarred mackerel boat. I had never been inside the lighthouse before, and I had only seen Pew when he stumped up the path to collect his supplies. The town didn’t have much to do with the lighthouse anymore. Salts was no longer a seaman’s port, with ships and sailors docking for fire and food and company. Salts had become a hollow town, its life scraped out. It had its rituals and its customs and its past, but nothing left in it was alive. Years ago, Charles Darwin had called it Fossil-Town, but for different reasons. Fossil it was, salted and preserved by the sea that had destroyed it too.

Pew came near in his boat. His shapeless hat was pulled over his face. His mouth was a slot of teeth. His hands were bare and purple. Nothing else could be seen. He was the rough shape of human.

DogJim growled. Pew grabbed him by the scruff and threw him into the boat, then he motioned for me to throw in my bag and follow.

The little outboard motor bounced us over the green waves. Behind me, smaller and smaller, was my tipped-up house that had flung us out, my mother and I, perhaps because we were never wanted there. I couldn’t go back. There was only forward, northwards into the sea. To the lighthouse.

Pew and I climbed slowly up the spiral stairs to our quarters below the Light. Nothing about the lighthouse had been changed since the day it was built. There were candleholders in every room, and the Bibles put there by Josiah Dark. I was given a tiny room with a tiny window, and a bed the size of a drawer. As I was not much longer than my socks, this didn’t matter. DogJim would have to sleep where he could.

Above me was the kitchen where Pew cooked sausages on an open cast-iron stove. Above the kitchen was the light itself, a great glass eye with a Cyclops stare.

Our business was light, but we lived in darkness. The light had to be kept going, but there was no need to illuminate the rest. Darkness came with everything. It was standard. My clothes were trimmed with dark. When I put on a sou’wester, the brim left a dark shadow over my face. When I stood to bathe in the little galvanised cubicle Pew had rigged for me, I soaped my body in darkness. Put your hand in a drawer, and it was darkness you felt first, as you fumbled for a spoon. Go to the cupboards to find the tea caddy of Full Strength Samson, and the hole was as black as the tea itself.

The darkness had to be brushed away or parted before we could sit down. Darkness squatted on the chairs and hung like a curtain across the stairway. Sometimes it too on the shapes of the things we wanted: a pan, a bed, a book. Sometimes I saw my mother, dark and silent, falling towards me.

Darkness was a presence. I learned to see in it, I learned to see through it, and I learned to see the darkness of my own.

Pew did not speak. I didn’t know if he was kind or unkind, or what he intended to do with me. He had lived alone all his life.

That first night, Pew cooked sausages in darkness. No, Pew cooked the sausages with darkness. It was the kind of dark you can taste. That’s what we ate: sausages and darkness.

I was cold and tired and my neck ached. I wanted to sleep and sleep and never wake up. I had lost the few things I knew, and what was here belonged to somebody else. Perhaps that would have been all right if what was inside me was my own, but there was no place to anchor.

There were two Atlantics; one outside the lighthouse, and one inside me.

The one inside me had no string of guiding lights.