Then we come to
The Powerbook (2000), in my opinion a more or less complete stinker. It seemed to me to be terribly inconsequential. A few stories intertwined here and there, which in earlier books like
Sexing the Cherry or
Art & Lies she has put to the service of a bigger story, but here they just seem to say the same things (literally) over and over again.
Only the impossible is worth the effort. There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet. And so on.
The plot, such as it is, yet again once more settles on the love triangle, as it did in
Written on the Body and
Gut Symmetries. It's true of course that all writers retread the same ground throughout their careers (she acknowledges it in one dialogue "A story I am writing." "What is it about?" "Boundaries. Desire." "What are your other books about?" "Boundaries. Desire." "Can't you write about something else?" "No.") but these seem more like different drafts for the same book rather than the same themes approached from different angles and ages.
Curiously, while Winterson raves (rightly) in essays and interviews about imagination being the most important thing for a writer, she lacks it in some important respects. While no-one can deny - and I have often had cause to celebrate - her fictional flights of fancy, she does have a difficulty, to the extent almost of disability, in imagining different characters. All her heroes are Jeanette - the feisty, the orphaned, the self-made woman, most of all the lover - and secondary characters are either her lovers (who are always, as I mentioned before, red-haired, like her real-life lover Peggy Reynolds) or the Philistines, which includes parents, cuckolds, businessmen, tourists ("So why am I not a tourist? A tourist could be anywhere. The place doesn't matter. It's just another TV channel."), and pretty much everyone else. Her antipathy towards the common herd is really quite astonishing in
The Powerbook:
...day-trippers from Sorrento, on package-holiday outings, clog up the smooth flow of money and goods from trader to shopper. The beautiful ageless women and their slightly sinister iron-haired men have to compete at the luxury windows with red legs and bad haircuts, as the migrant shorts population wonders out loud how much everything costs before moving on to another ice cream.
We can only assume she must have had her camera stolen in Capri once. All this self-righteousness, while present to an extent in
Art & Lies and
Gut Symmetries, really rankles here, perhaps because for the first time it's simply not shrouded in swathes of beautiful writing. There is the odd great phrase here and there - car seats "battered like prizefighters" - but not the paragraphs and pages of swoonsome prose that I have always had the urge to quote endlessly from her other books.
Lighthousekeeping (2004): If ever a book warranted the over-used (and usually optimistic) critical phrase "a return to form,"
Lighthousekeeping is it. After the brilliant but dense and closed
Art & Lies (of which Winterson now says "It was written at a time when I was looking inwards, not outwards ... sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't"), the patchy
Gut Symmetries and the (in my view) atrocious
The PowerBook,
Lighthousekeeping - supposedly the beginning of a new cycle in her writing - is a breath of sea air.
As a new cycle in her writing (she says her first seven novels were a complete cycle in themselves), it doesn't half look a lot like the old one. But this is to be expected: all writers revisit their old turf throughout their lives: as Martin Amis said when pre-empting such criticisms of
Yellow Dog, "the perspective is like a shadow moving across a lawn." So
Lighthousekeeping retains Winterson's abiding interest in love ("the greatest human achievement"), storytelling ("Trust me. I'm telling you stories"), the multiplicity of history, parentless children and boundaries of desire, but puts them in the service of something lighter and brighter than we have seen from her probably since
Sexing the Cherry.
They say you can tell something of a person's life by observing their body. This is certainly true of my dog. My dog has back legs shorter than his front legs, on account of always digging in at one end, and always scrambling up at the other. On ground level he walks with a kind of bounce that adds to his cheerfulness. He doesn't know that other dogs' legs are the same length all the way round. If he thinks at all, he thinks every dog is like him, and so he suffers none of the morbid introspection of the human race, which notes every curve from the norm with fear or punishment.
The story is narrated, as you can see from the extract in my first post above, by Silver. Silver's gender remains undeclared through most of the book, as a ten-year-old child, which I thought was an echo of
Written on the Body where Winterson did the same thing, although I have never been able to read the narrator there as anything other than a woman, and a Jeanette-shaped woman at that. Anyway towards the end we discover that Silver when fully grown wears a bra, so we can - probably - put paid to that theory. Silver is orphaned when her mother, roped to her to climb the slope to their home, falls:
The wind was strong enough to blow the fins off a fish. It was Shrove Tuesday, and we had been out to buy flour and eggs to make pancakes. At one time we kept our own hens, but the eggs rolled away, and we had the only hens in the world who had to hang on by their beaks as they tried to lay.
I was excited that day, because tossing pancakes was something you could do really well in our house - the steep slope under the oven turned the ritual of loosening and tossing into a kind of jazz. My mother danced while she cooked because she said it helped her to keep her balance.
Up she went, carrying the shopping, and pulling me behind her like an after-thought. Then some new thought must have clouded her mind, because she suddenly stopped and half-turned, and in that moment the wind blew like a shriek, and her own shriek was lost as she slipped.
In a minute she had dropped past me, and I was hanging on to one of our spiny shrubs - escallonia, I think it was, a salty shrub that could withstand the sea and the blast. I could feel its roots slowly lifting like a grave opening. I kicked the toes of my shoes into the sandy bank, but the ground wouldn't give. We were both going to fall, falling away from the cliff face to a blacked-out world.
I couldn't hang on any longer. My fingers were bleeding. Then, as I closed my eyes, ready to drop and drop, all the weight behind me seemed to lift. The bush stopped moving. I pulled myself up on it and scrambled behind it.
I looked down.
My mother had gone. The rope was idling against the rock. I pulled it towards me over my arm, shouting, 'Mummy! Mummy!'
The rope came faster and faster, burning the top of my wrist as I coiled it next to me. Then the double buckle came. Then the harness. She had undone the harness to save me.
Ten years before I had pitched through space to find the channel of her body and come to earth. Now she had pitched through her own space, and I couldn't follow her.
She was gone.
And so Silver ends up, via the obligatory narky old maid character, living with Pew, keeper of the Cape Wrath lighthouse. Pew, of course, is blind, and may or may not have lived for hundreds of years. He keeps Silver entertained by telling her stories, mostly of the 19th century clergyman Babel Dark (no shortage of symbolic names here, no sir), who visited Cape Wrath and knew Robert Louis Stevenson and betrayed his wife with a scarlet (literally; the old Winterson obsession with redheads is back too) woman. The lighthouse is a richly suggestive symbol itself of course: "a known point in the darkness", part of "a string of lights" on "the coasts and outcrops of this treacherous ocean."
But for all its open-to-interpretation symbolism,
Lighthousekeeping, like most of Winterson's books, doesn't really leave you in any doubt about where the author is coming from. She still values love over all else:
But today, when the sun is everywhere, and everything solid is nothing but its own shadow, I know that the real things in life, the things I remember, the things I turn over in my hands, are not houses, bank accounts, prizes or promotions. What I remember is love - all love - love of this dirt road, the sunrise, a day by the river, the stranger I met in a café.
But what is missing in
Lighthousekeeping is the bitterness and ranting - one might almost say raving - against consumerism, tourists, heterosexual marriage, other people, which increasingly marred everything from
Art & Lies onward. It seems then that Winterson has, miraculously, found a way to express - and boy can she express; only now when looking up these quotes I have been diverted and diverted again by endless brilliant phrases among the pages - her passion for the life she loves without turning it into an attack on Everything Else. Where before she could be a marauding mob brandishing torches of naked flames, burning things down (albeit asking questions at the same time): now she is a kindly light, still bright and powerful enough to be seen for miles but under control, a known point in the darkness of so much contemporary fiction.
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