Tring Book Club - The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson

I hadn't read anything by Jeanette Winterson before "The Gap of Time". She is certainly a highly creative and intellectual writer. At the same time she can create passages that race by. Sometimes you end up reading so fast it is almost at a breathless pace. There is something strange about the story, but Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale" (which is retold here in the Hogarth series) is similarly a little crazy.

The original text has a lot to say about time, and so does this cover version. "Sometimes it doesn't matter that there was any time before this time. Sometimes it doesn't matter that its night or day or now or then. Sometimes where you are is enough. It's not that time stops or that it hasn't started. This is time. You are here. This caught moment opening into a lifetime." There are paragraphs like this one that originally left me baffled. But on typing this now, I get what the author is trying to say.

The gap of 16 years in the play is described by the chorus (Time) in 16 lines:

I, that please some, try all, both joy and terror

Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error,

Now take upon me, in the name of Time,

To use my wings. Impute it not a crime

To me or my swift passage, that I slide

O’er sixteen years and leave the growth untried

Of that wide gap, since it is in my power

To o’erthrow law and in one self-born hour

To plant and o’erwhelm custom. Let me pass

The same I am, ere ancient’st order was

Or what is now received: I witness to

The times that brought them in; so shall I do

To the freshest things now reigning and make stale

The glistering of this present, as my tale

Now seems to it. Your patience this allowing,

I turn my glass and give my scene such growing

As you had slept between: Leontes leaving,

The effects of his fond jealousies so grieving

That he shuts up himself, imagine me,

Gentle spectators, that I now may be

In fair Bohemia, and remember well,

I mentioned a son o’ the king’s, which Florizel

I now name to you; and with speed so pace

To speak of Perdita, now grown in grace

Equal with wondering: what of her ensues

I list not prophecy; but let Time’s news

Be known when ’tis brought forth.

A shepherd’s daughter,

And what to her adheres, which follows after,

Is the argument of Time. Of this allow,

If ever you have spent time worse ere now;

If never, yet that Time himself doth say

He wishes earnestly you never may.

Having seen the play a couple of times in the last few years, the episode when Hermione's statue comes back to life is both unintentionally comic and silly. However, Winterson has turned this scene into something brilliantly dramatic and emotional. In some ways I thought she actually tried too hard to give us most of the characters and mimic the plot from the original. But in the end she has made something vivid and coherent for the modern reader.