After the death of her mother, the 10-year-old fatherless Silver becomes an orphan. With no place to anchor, her teacher, Mrs. Pinch apprentices her to the enigmatic Pew, a blind old lighthouse keeper, who can miraculously see through all of time. Pew is a "rough shape of a human", an old man with "a bag of stories under his arm"; an unfathomable figure, "he was and he wasn't."

Initially fraught at losing all the things she knew and fretted over, Silver gradually learns to like the mysterious old man. As she cooks for him and helps with cleaning the various instruments, she begins to notice that there are days "when he could have evaporated into the spray, and days when he actually was the light house."

Pew tells her that if she really wants to be at "one" with the lighthouse, she must learn the lighthouse's stories, the brittle ghosts of the building's past, the stories that are "layered in time." For Pew, our past existence and the stories that we keep are like the flashes of light the lighthouse sends out to passing ships, a human connection in a world that is composed of both light and dark.

Pew tells Silver the story of Babel Dark, a nineteenth-century clergyman, who was named after the biblical tower. Dark, a secret bigamist has been living double life. Trapped in a loveless marriage, Dark is besotted by Molly, a red headed, passionate girl with whom he lives for only two months a year under the name of Lux. Dark is a living version of the lighthouse, a life troubled and distressed by the forces of night and day.

Dark is desperately in love with Molly, but he can't give her the total commitment she so desperately wants. Thus his life is fraught with turmoil and disorder. Silver, as she grows older, begins to realize that like Babel Dark, her life is also a trail of shipwrecks and set-sails. No arrivals, no destinations, "another boat, another ride." And she ponders what it was like to be lost and alone a hundred and fifty years ago.

Through these parallel lives, Winterson is saying that life is often fraught with chance. We meet, we don't meet, and we take the wrong turning, "and still bump into one another." Sometimes we even "conscientiously" choose the right road but it leads nowhere. But amongst all this chaos is love. Love is eternal, a force of nature, "as strong as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, and as gigantic." When it burns out the planet (and we) die.

In sparse, but beautiful language the author paints a portrait of humanity that is eternally restless, and like the solidity of the lighthouse, we yearn for a stable world without volatility, precariousness, and inexplicableness.

Silver, stripped of the bright security of the lighthouse, wanders the world in search of meaning, stealing a book and bird that she believes might hold enlightenment. Dark's ending is tragedy, as he suspends his mistrust in Molly and professes his love too late.

Silver survives and finds true love because she accepts the enigmatic true state of human nature, and carries with her the gift of storytelling that Pew was ultimately able to bestow on her. Mike Leonard June 05.


"My life is a hesitation in time, an opening in a cave."   April 15, 2005
 20 out of 40 found this review helpful

Operatic in its construction, Jeanette Winterson's magnificently descriptive, impressionistic novel, tells two interconnected stories, each of them asking who we are as humans, how do we connect to the past, and what makes our lives worth living. On its modern level, it is the story of Silver, born in 1959, "part precious metal, part pirate." A young girl without a father, Silver is orphaned at ten and moves into the local lighthouse with Pew, the aged and blind lighthousekeeper, whose family has tended the light in northwest Scotland since 1828. There, she polishes the brasswork, makes the tea, and listens to Pew's stories, some of them historical and some more fanciful, but all of them filled with wisdom and lessons from the past.

The lighthouse, we learn through Pew's stories, was built by the father of Robert Louis Stevenson, who in 1878, returned to the light for a visit, where he became fascinated by the story of Babel Dark, a local preacher, who became the inspiration for Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dark, we learn through stories, fell in love with beautiful Molly in the early 1850s, then saw her embracing another man, became overcome with jealousy, and rejected her. After marrying another, however, he is soon drawn back to Molly, taking the symbolic name of Lux (meaning "light") when he is with her. His inability to control his emotions, however, leads to his Hyde-like abuse of women. "He was dark...the light in him never lit."

As the stories of Silver (which reflects light) and Babel Dark develop in parallel, the novel takes on operatic qualities, with the two stories often sounding like duets sung in counterpoint to each other. As each person seeks fulfillment through love, the primary quality which separates man from animals, the cadence of Winterson's writing rises and falls, swirls, and turns in upon itself, with the same themes of creation, connection, and the continuity of life echoing throughout. Winterson's incorporation of the Tristan and Isolde story and the visit of Charles Darwin to the lighthouse expands and further emphasizes the themes.

Both romantic and philosophical, Winterson offers much unique imagery. Pew, for example, is a "silent, taciturn clamp of a man." An Albanian family was "vacuum-packed into a ship," the grandmother, "all sun-dried tomato, tough, chewy, skin split with the heat." Her narrative tempo is flawless, the language elegant, and the characterization consistent with the themes. The end of the book harks back to the beginning, completing a circle and granting new insights into her meanings. A rich novel which the reader will want to read slowly and savor.