Silver's Story | Lighthousekeeping

I had a train journey to Royston & back last weekend. Lighthousekeeping accompanied me, as did Their Eyes Were Watching God and both of which I managed to finish.

Lighthousekeeping was as good as it first promised to be.
It made me laugh:

After the Talking Bird, the nice man at the Tavistock Clinic kept asking me why I stole books and birds, though I had only ever stolen one of each.
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'Was there no human being you could have talked to instead?'
'I wasn't talking to the bird. The bird was talking to me.'

There was a long pause. There are some things that shouldn't be said in company. See above.

and it prompted me to delight in her use of language and power of expression:

What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.

Plus more on that favourite of themes, with echoes reaching back to Oranges:

... it matched a moment in me that was waiting for someone to call my name. Names are still magic: even Sharon, Karen, Darren and Warren are magic to somebody somewhere. In the fairy stories, naming is knowledge. When I know your name, I call your name, and when I call your name, you'll come to me.

There were other elements of classic Winterson in Lighthousekeeping, which I enjoyed:

the quirky heroine overcoming the odds pitched against her and journeying through life; affirmative first-person narrative; her episodic style, interspersed by myth & tales: Babel Dark's history
as recounted by Pew,Tristan & Isolde making an appearance;
Silver's refrain; story-telling; love-making; a nod to the multiplicity of female identity:

There's always a woman somewhere, child; a princess; a princess, a witch, a stepmother, a mermaid, a fairy godmother, or as one as wicked as she is beautiful, or as beautiful as she is good.
Is that the complete list?
Then there's the woman you love.

Babel Dark's character was somewhat beguiling in its duality. The journals serving as a brilliant example of this, strengthened later by Stevenson's inclusion in the novel along with his text of Jekyll & Hyde.

He kept two journals; the first, a mild and scholarly account of a clergyman's life in Scotland. The second, a wild and torn folder of scattered pages, disordered, unnumbered, punctured where his nib had bitten the paper.

Babel as the minister with its social standing in Salts, a role that grants authority but also serves to hem him in, curtailing his freedom. Acting as a man of faith whilst being confronted by Darwinism. Challenged by his duty to God to the extent that he betrays himself & his real love: I stood firm, I stood firm, I stood firm.
The complexity of his feelings towards Molly. You could just about forgive his infidelity, his bi-annual escape to Bristol as Mr. Lux, were it not for the dark human aspect of his character: his jealousy breaking out in violence, the harsh treatment of his wife where his frustration manifests itself through abuse.

I enjoyed the introduction to Silver and the surreal state of her childhood but I was increasingly charmed by her upon her relocation to Bristol & the lengths to which she went in overcoming library bureaucracy so as to complete Death in Venice.

I liked "The Hut " episode within the novel but this also created a questionable flaw for me, within the novel. There was something in the handling of Silver's romance with the girl from the convent which seemed to disrupt the flow of her story. 

Almost like the novel tripped itself up in its eagerness to pull in a love interest to aid Silver's journey to self-fulfillment & understanding. Something too conventional in how the inclusion of a romance was equated towards the completion of Silver's journey. 

I'm still trying to work through whether Winterson really intended it as thus: the love interest serving as an end in itself, rather than the means to her eventual end. 

I had been rooting for Silver to find that sense of understanding & her path through life and to find it from within herself, not simply due to finding love with someone else.

Winterson uses the metaphor of the open door:

I fell asleep, and dreamed of a door opening.
Doors opening into rooms that opened into doors that opened into rooms. We burst through, panelled, baize, flushed, glazed, steel, reinforced, safe doors, secret doors, double doors, trap doors. The forbidden door that can only be opened with a small silver key.
You are the door in the rock that finally swings free when moonlight shines upon it.. You are the door that opens onto a sea of stars.

- which could just be a metaphor for an awakening through finding a connection through love, sex and conversation - but then again,

Open me. Wide. Narrow. Pass through me, and whatever lies on the other side, could not be reached except by this. This you. This me. This caught moment opening into a lifetime.

Does the girl from the convent resolve one aspect of Silver's search or is she, like Pew, DogJim & Babel Dark, an equal contributor towards Silver's journey's end?
 Because the novel does reach completion with her homecoming - regaining the haven of her lighthouse:

I took out my little silver key and opened the door into our kitchen [..] Finally, not knowing what I did, I had come back ... I got up, opened the drawer.. took out the key and wound the spring. Tick, tick, tick. Better - much better. Time had begun again.
... I had often seen this light. Inland, land-locked, sailing my years, uncertain of my position, the light had been what Pew had promised - marker, guide, comfort and warning.
Then I saw him. Pew in the blue boat.

~ Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. Harper Perennial: London, 2004.

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Plot: ****
Fun: ****
Novelty: ****
Overall: ****