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Main page » Fiction literature » Lighthousekeeping


Lighthousekeeping

 

 

The heroines of Jeanette Winterson's fiction have been fighting gravity for decades. With fantastical powers of weightlessness, walking on water and winging their way through cyberspace, their quest is to attain a bearable lightness of being. Moving in spirals rather than lines, her fiction reaches towards a timeless centre and she claims that her previous novel, The PowerBook, marked the end of a seven-novel cycle. With Lighthousekeeping, she has begun again.

 

Silver, the 10-year old, fatherless narrator, lives with her mother in Salts, 'a sea-flung, rock-bitten, sand-edged shell of a town', in a house cut into a slope so steep that 'the chairs had to be nailed to the floor, and we were never allowed to eat spaghetti'. This fairytale form of the hills where Jeanette's mother preached in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit represents the precipitous psychological states of these unbalanced characters. So precarious is the ground beneath their feet that mother and daughter must be roped together, but when her mother slips over the cliff's edge, the orphaned Silver plummets into emotional freefall and begins her quest for a safety net.




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Tags: Lighthousekeeping, their, fiction, Jeanette, Winterson