After stealing a talking parrot on the island of Capri, Jeanette Winterson's latest narrator is referred to the Tavistock Clinic, where she explains that she was trying to capture some sort of meaning. The therapist innocently suggests she write a story, 'with a beginning, a middle and an end', to get back in touch with reality. That was never quite on the cards: as Winterson predictably claims, you can never tell just one story, and there's no such thing as an ending, even though she has described her previous seven novels as a completed cycle. Perhaps Lighthousekeeping returns us to the beginning of the cycle, offering an elegiac, fantastical setting for the naive, blunt, genial voice of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985).

LRB 3 June 2004 | PDF Download