Silver goes south, begins to steal, has a breakdown. Meanwhile, poor Silver’s life plunges into dark again Pew’s love had sustained her, but now the lighthouse is automated and he vanishes. The moral is simple: “Never doubt the one you love.” There will be flashes of light in Babel’s later life before the dark closes in for good. Babel’s dark is of his own making when, suspecting, wrongly, that Molly has another lover, he punishes her with blows, then enters the clergy and a loveless marriage in far distant Silts. That story comes to us in fragments, interleaved with Silver’s. The tale concerns the lighthouse, its founder, wealthy Bristol merchant Josiah Dark, and his son, Babel, who in 1848 seemed set to marry his pretty girlfriend Molly. Pew is blind but has a good heart, and his storytelling saves Silver from despair. When Silver is ten, in 1969, a mighty wind blows her mother into oblivion, and Silver is taken in by Pew, the lighthouse keeper, as his apprentice. Silver, the girl, lives with her mother in Salts, on Scotland’s northwestern coast, sailor father long gone. A 19th-century man travels from light into darkness a 20th-century girl travels, stumblingly, from darkness into light. The British author gives us two lives from two centuries. there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.” Winterson’s latest is all about light and dark, love and its absence.
He took hold of it, tied it round his waist, and at that moment, the keeper saw him, and ran for the rescue boat.“The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. With his last strength he began to paddle towards it, arms on either side of the spar, and in his mind the light became a shining rope, pulling him in. And the night fell, he saw the Cape Wrath light, only lit a week it was, but it was, and he knew that if he became the story of the light, he might be saved. The story he told was of a man lost and found, not once, but many times, as he choked his way out of the waves. On the seventh day he had told all the stories he knew and that was when he began to tell himself as if he were a story, from the earliest beginnings to his green and deep misfortune.
“There was a man here, lashed himself to a spar as his ship went down, and for seven days and seven nights he was on the sea, and what kept him alive while others drowned was telling himself stories like a madman, so that as one ended another began.
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