Casting light on darkness

To have written as successful a first novel as Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit could be seen as both a blessing and a curse; but Jeanette Winterson has often managed to slip free of her readers' expectations, with the light elusiveness of her prose, and her understanding of both the limitations and possibilities of story-telling.

At times, in Winterson's later, denser, books, like Art and Lies, you might feel that the story itself has eluded her - lost in a tangle of meta-fiction, weighed down by literary theorising - but her newest novel is a marvellously skilful juggling act of ideas and emotion.

Lighthousekeeping is a short book that leaps through the centuries, threading together the apparently "true" stories of Charles Darwin and Robert Louis Stevenson with those of the orphaned girl Silver, taken in by Mr Pew, the keeper of the lighthouse at Cape Wrath.

Pew is blind, but teaches Silver - another of Winterson's archetypal red-haired young narrators - that stories light up the darkness; that the continuous narrative of our lives is a lie, but that we have moments of illumination, where everything is clear, before the darkness falls again.

As Pew tells Silver, lighthousekeeping is not just a matter of understanding the instruments, but of keeping the light of story-telling, the lifelines that save us from drowning: "every light had a story - no, every light was a story, and the flashes themselves were the stories going out over the waves, as markers and guides and comfort and warning."

This might sound overly schematic, but Winterson's prodigious talent brings the book alive, as in her description of the place of Silver's birth ("Salts. My home town.

A sea-flung, rock-bitten, sandedged shell of a town. Oh, and a lighthouse.") Silver, like Winterson, was born in 1959, but the story that lights her way forward is that of a previous inhabitant, Babel Dark, a 19th century clergyman come to Salts having left behind the love of his life. Dark's tale - of love lost, and found, and lost again - collides with those of Darwin and Stevenson, who meet him in Salts.

It is Dark's life, in Winterson's imaginary landscape, that provides the outline for Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; and it is Darwin who provides a ray of hope for Dark, when he feels he is forever undone, never to be whole again. "Nothing can be forgotten," says Darwin to Dark. "Nothing can be lost. The universe itself is one vast memory system. Look back and you will find the beginnings of the world."

For Silver, though, like Winterson, love cannot be found "in the fossil record of our existence ... You cannot find it held in the earth's crust, waiting to be discovered. The long bones of our ancestors show nothing of their hearts." Instead, love is found in stories, in its telling; and though "I love you" are acknowledged in this book as "the three most difficult words in the world", in the end they become the most important, as well as the simplest, tale of all.