Dark is a living version of the lighthouse. His dislocating mind is unravelling into the ether in his double life of two marriages one loveless, the other based on enlightening love that is flawed by doubt, and he lives for only two months a year with his beloved Molly under the name of Lux. Dark embodies the dynamic of the novel's epigraphs - 'Remember you must die' and 'Remember you must live'.
The present day narrative is intertwined with the story Pew tells of Salts's nineteenth-century clergyman, Babel Dark, named after the biblical tower. Like all Winterson's work, this is a love story, but love lives at an angle: 'Love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in.' To do this, she must learn the lighthouse's stories, for the universe is not to be found in a grain of sand but in these flashes of light, each holding a story healing broken human connection. Silver is apprenticed to the blind, Homeric lighthousekeeper Pew, who can see all of time, and his instruction to Silver echoes EM Forster's to 'only connect'. 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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