![]() there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark'. The lighthouse is the potent metaphor structuring the novel, on the principle that 'the continuous narrative of existence is a lie. ![]() ![]() It's to the lighthouse - 'a still point in motion' and 'known point in darkness' - that Winterson (self-professed heir of Virginia Woolf) steers Silver. Salts is 'a hollow town, its life scraped out', emotionally and linguistically sterile, like Muck House in The PowerBook. This disconnected, rootless emptiness, though, is the magical space from which Winterson's characters distil their elixir. 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. ![]() 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. ![]() 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'. ![]()
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