Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Uneven work from this always provocative writer.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Please notice, though, that Silver’s lover has Pew’s long fingers: all the lives here are connected, and the nameless joins the circle that binds Babel and Pew and Silver. The novel, gloriously edgy at the start (there’s a schoolteacher guaranteed to freeze your blood), now settles into the groove of a generic pastoral idyll, and the writing suffers.
Much later, on a Greek island, she finds true love (her lover is a woman, but that’s secondary). 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. “The continuous narrative of existence is a lie.
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