Fairy dust Jeanette Winterson floats away BY NINA MACLAUGHLIN
	Lighthousekeeping By Jeanette Winterson. Harcourt, 240 pages, $23.

Fairy tales are not the only kind of stories. But it is fairy-tale mode — with its magic, its gothic sexual romance, its less-mighty-than-myth quality — that British novelist Jeannette Winterson returns to in her eighth novel. It’s been four years since The Powerbook, a complete critical disaster, and Winterson fans, always an ardent breed, will be relieved to find that Lighthousekeeping marks a return to the trademark intimacy of her acclaimed The Passion, Sexing the Cherry, and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. It’s cyclical, circular, and surreal (a grayer, mistier Magritte), and the Biblical lilt of it is counterbalanced by glimmering flimsiness.

Lighthousekeeping is the story of Silver, who, orphaned at age 10, is sent to live with Mr. Pew, blind keeper of the Cape Wrath lighthouse in the town of Salts on the Atlantic-blasted northwest tip of Scotland. Like blind Homer, Pew tells stories, and the Silver narrative overlaps with Pew’s tale of Babel Dark, a 19th-century clergyman with two wives leading a double life of passion and deceit, romance and abuse. Wrapped into this Wintersonian layering is the government’s announcement that the lighthouse will be automated and both Pew and Silver ousted from the lonely tower. When technology replaces humanity, Winterson suggests, storytelling goes the way of the dodo and the dinosaur. Pew and Silver head their separate ways, Silver on a journey inspired by the tale of Babel and his two loves.

The book is as much about storytelling as it is about Silver: a story about a story about a story. The form follows a seahorse tail — an image second only to that of the lighthouse — spiraling around itself: "A beginning, a middle and an end is the proper way to tell a story. But I have difficulty with that method," Silver admits. And there’s no reason to fault her for it. Or for her more obvious narrating of the narrative: " . . . the stories I want to tell you will light up part of my life, and leave the rest in darkness. You don’t need to know everything. There is no everything. The stories themselves make up the meaning. The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark."

Winterson is at her best at the beginning, when delivering us to the severity of the Scottish shoreline, when introducing us to the mercurial Mr. Pew and the brave Silver. The first 50 pages or so beg to be read aloud. But the story falters, and badly, when Silver leaves the lighthouse. Winterson slips back into purple, self-indulgent prose, and her aphorisms become cloying. "If I hadn’t been an orphan, I would never have known Pew," says Silver to a misanthropic Miss Pinch. "What possible difference could that have made?" Pinch responds. Silver: "The difference that loves makes." Pew indeed.

The plot of Lighthousekeeping also flickers. Silver flees to Capri, steals a talking bird, is committed to a mental institution and put on Prozac. It’s as if we were in an entirely different book. References to Prozac, to SPF 15, even Starbucks, feel cheap and anachronistic. One of Winterson’s strengths is her out-of-time quality. Tossing around contemporary references breaks the fairy-tale spell; it’s like finding suntan lotion in "Little Red Riding Hood" or Ambien in "Sleeping Beauty."

References to other novels, myths, and historical figures do better to flesh out the story. Darwin makes a cameo in the Babel Dark tale. Robert Louis Stevenson also waltzes through, writing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after meeting Babel. There’s Tristan and Isolde, and a reference to E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India: "I lay there, stretched out, looking at the one star visible through the tiny window of the room. Only connect. How can you do that when the connections are broken?" And an allusion to Winterson’s patron saint, Virginia Woolf: "I couldn’t go back. There was only forward, northwards into the sea. To the lighthouse." It feels less like a nod and more like a jumping up and down with arms flailing.

Despite the insistence on there being no ends to stories, the book does end in a satisfying way. The moral imperative of making sure the people whom you love know you love them anchors these stories, if anchor is the right word for something as seemingly insubstantial as Lighthousekeeping.

Jeanette Winterson reads this Wednesday, April 13, at 6:30 p.m. in the Boston Public Library’s Rabb Lecture Hall; call (617) 536-5400.