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Books: Of love and other demons
Independent, The (London), May 7, 2004 by CHRISTINA PATTERSON
On the window sill of Jeanette Winterson's parlour, there is a framed cartoon. "She's a feisty dame alright" says one character nervously to another. "I give her new book a rotten review and she turns up on the doorstep." In the final frame, a minion pops his head around the corner. "Barbara Cartland would like a word with you," he announces cheerily.
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The joke, of course, is that it's Jeanette Winterson who is famously feisty. It was she who "turned up on the doorstep" of a journalist who had given her a bad review, an incident that instantly entered the canon of Authors Behaving Badly. Clearly, she has a sense of humour. A real one, because the cartoon isn't on display, but lying flat behind a curtain. While Winterson is upstairs being photographed, I've been snooping around - gazing in wonder, in fact, at the pared down elegance of her beautiful Georgian house. It's a perfect combination of old and new: walls painted a classy plum or muted grey-green, a PowerBook perched on a Chinese lacquer table, gorgeous cast iron fireplaces and ornate gilt candle sticks set against the stark simplicity of a white enamel sink.
When Jeanette Winterson bursts into the room, she is herself a powerhouse: a tiny, elfin creature in an orange fleece and beige cords. Her hair is wild and gets wilder as we talk. "There's a Prada opening across the road," she tells me as we wait for the kettle to boil. "My friends have said it'll be great for the sales!" There is little sign, as she spoons tea into the pot and asks anxiously about the strength and colour, of the fierce, austere creature I've been led to expect.
It is nearly 20 years since the publication of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the semi-autiobiographical novel of a Pentecostal childhood that made her name and, five years later, gripping television. Her adoptive mother died during the second episode. Poetic justice, perhaps, or maybe the Old Testament kind, for a woman who plucked a child from an orphanage with the sole purpose of making a missionary. She succeeded.
When God was booted out, art burst in. Jeanette Winterson has never stopped being a missionary. Her work, and conversation, is infused with the passion of the true believer, one who believes in the redemptive power of stories and love. Her second novel was even called The Passion. A surreally baroque tale of androgynous ecstasy, it glides between Napoleon's kitchens and Venice in a poetic dance that sets Winterson firmly outside the social- realist tradition. It ends with a statement that is, for Winterson, almost a mantra: "I'm telling you stories. Trust me."
Sexing the Cherry followed, a dazzling blend of madrigal-singing toads, dancing princesses and a Dog Woman who lives on the banks of the Thames. Some reviewers were already balking at the weirdness, but most were rapturous. It was only with Written on the Body, a philosophical meditation on the body and love, that things started to go seriously belly-up. Jeanette Winterson, said reviewers, had lost the plot (something which had never, in any case, featured prominently in her work) and must be punished for her hubris.
The PowerBook, published in 2000, marked the first stirrings of a return to grace. Set in London, Paris, Capri and cyberspace, it weaves together cover-versions, fairy tales and popular culture in a love story that's also a contemporary fable. In cyberspace, she had found her perfect metaphor: a world without boundaries in which all the traditional markers of linear narrative - time, place and fixed identities - have dissolved. Her new novel, Lighthousekeeping (Fourth Estate, pounds 15), draws on many of her familiar themes, but also introduces a raft of new ones. There's storytelling, love and art, of course, but there's also light and dark, Darwin and the Double.
Motherless Silver, adrift in the world, is taken in by Pew, keeper of the Cape Wrath lighthouse. While tending the light that keeps seafarers from their death, Pew cooks sausages in the darkness and tells ancient tales of rootlessness and long- ing. One of these, about a 19th-century clergyman called Babel Dark, takes root and becomes a leitmotiv of love and loss, weaving in and out of Silver's story.
Repressed, cruel Dark has an alter-ego called Lux in a tale with echoes of Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde. Meanwhile, back in what may or may not be the present, Silver has some kind of (archetypally modernist) nervous collapse. "I am coloured glass from a church window long since shattered," she says. "I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them."
It's a plot to make the heart sink, but Lighthousekeeping is a brilliant, glittering piece of work, the kind that makes you gasp out loud at the sheer beauty of the language. The key note of Winterson's prose, like her house, is pared down elegance, here charged with a luminous, lyrical intensity.
"I was walking on the canal in Regent's Park," she tells me, "and a sentence came into my head fully formed, which is the first sentence. And I thought, ooh, I wonder who that is... Then I wait to see if the thing goes away, or if it's just an over-excitable bit of lunch I've had and it will pass. It didn't pass," she grins. "The process is maddening," she adds, "because I don't write sequentially, and I never number pages till the very end. It's a real act of faith - so it's a good job I was brought up the way I was!"
