The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson, book review: A modern rewriting

An ingenious updating of Shakespeare that avoids the temptation to become a mere jeu d'esprit

Deeply felt novel: A Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare ( (Guildhall Art Gallery)

Split down the middle into a tragic first half and a comedic second, Shakespeare's late play The Winter's Tale mingles fairytale coincidence with psychological realism so unapologetically that some people have always found it hard to take. Not so Jeanette Winterson, whose new novel is a modern rewriting of the story which pays tribute to its imaginative riches and message of human hope and redemption.

Myth and fairytale have long been integral to Winterson's vision, seen in works ranging from her classic first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1985), to lesser-known outings such as Weight (2006), her retelling of the Atlas legend, and even her delightful children's book The King of Capri.

Her own history – movingly and thrillingly told in her autobiographical Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal (2012) – is something of a real-life fairytale. Herself a modern changeling, she was adopted as a baby by the extraordinary Mrs Winterson, whose gargantuan personality and religious superstitions would have crushed a lesser spirit. Instead, the young Jeanette transmogrified her experiences – and early exposure to the resonant language of the Bible – and remade herself into one of the most original literary voices of our time. She knows what she is talking about when she quotes Ezra Pound's “make it new” in this book about the relationship of past to present.

The Gap of Time transplants Shakespeare to contemporary London. Leo (Leontes) is no longer king of Sicilia but a master of the universe with a hedge fund, a helicopter, and a personality that verges on the sociopathic, while his wife MiMi (Hermione) is a famous French folk singer. As in the original, the dramatic events get going when Leo freaks out in unfounded suspicion that his wife has been sleeping with his best friend, Xen (Polixenes). Winterson fleshes out the well-established critical convention which finds a homoerotic charge in their relationship by making them former lovers at their public school, while updating Xen into a US-based writer of computer games, and a commitment-phobe who can't make sense of his own emotions.

Leo refuses, against all evidence, to believe that MiMi's newborn daughter Perdita is his. As one of the super-rich, he can use his money to do whatever he likes, so he has the baby abducted and sent across the Atlantic, supposedly to Xen. However, his plans go awry and in New Orleans (“New Bohemia”), she is rescued from a hospital “babyhatch” by a bar owner and piano-player, Shep (the Shepherd), who brings her up and nurtures her well for 18 years.

Perdita grows up to become a musician like her lost mother, and – with every symbolic coincidence in place – falls in love at 18 with Xen's son and heads for London, where she makes herself known to her real father. The original play's denouement provides perhaps the single most moving moment in Shakespeare, when the statue of Hermione, thought dead, comes to life. Here, it takes place at a concert at the Roundhouse, where MiMi appears on stage, having spent the intervening time as a recluse in Paris. As in a fairytale, and arguably in The Winter's Tale itself (the phrase meant a folk tale to Shakespeare's original audience), the protagonists are universal types placed in universal situations designed to highlight the basics of human response to the raw events of life, from birth to sex to death.

What is lost in this treatment in terms of character individuation is found in the symbolic unfolding of a narrative whose component scenes are viscerally rendered, as when Leo, in his crazed, pornographic, sexual jealousy – an offshoot of his over-reaching, ultimately self-defeating, desire for control – gets an employee to fit a hidden webcam in his wife's bedroom, and misinterprets all he sees to fit his darkest fantasies. The voyeurism is there in Shakespeare's original; Winterson finds a way to make it new.

Throughout, Winterson's “cover version”, as she calls it, remains very faithful to its source, often with great ingenuity and always with good humour. The pedlar Autolycus, for example, becomes a used-car salesman with a genius for riffs on the Oedipus complex. Shakespearean jokes often fall flat for modern audiences; Winterson provides some updated laugh-out-loud moments (as when Leo takes in a copy of Nuts to show his Kleinian analyst, whose world revolves around the good breast and the bad breast), and some delightful one-liners on everything from the contradictions of capitalism to the way in which Château d'Yquem tastes like golden syrup mixed with mould to the uninitiated.

Yet this is also a deeply felt, emotionally intelligent and serious novel, which resists easy answers and yet expresses the hope that human beings can muddle through, and that bad pasts can have good outcomes. What could have been a cynically postmodern jeu d'esprit pulsates with such authenticity and imaginative generosity that I defy you not to engage with it. The style is relaxed and easy but never flabby: a literary “art lawful as eating”, to quote Shakespeare's original. Winterson's faith in what she calls, in her postscript, the “written wor(l)d I can't live without” shines through. If Shakespeare's play, her near-namesake, has as much personal resonance for the novelist as it appears, she must have been in a good place to have written this Winterson's tale.