The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson

My book group does a Secret Santa every year at our Christmas meal. Everybody wraps a book and puts it in a bag, and you pick one out. They’re not chosen specially for you, but I’ve come away with some great things in the past – notably, it introduced me to David Sedaris. It has also introduced me, now, to Jeanette Winterson – three years ago I got The Gap of Time (2015), which is a retelling of one of my favourite Shakespeare plays, The Winter’s Tale. Or a ‘cover version’, in the parlance of this edition – with a handy synopsis of the play at the beginning, for those who aren’t familiar with it.

It starts with a short section where an unnamed narrator witnesses a man being pulled from a car and beaten to death. Yikes! And then he and his son see something at the nearby hospital, where his wife had died.

And that’s when I see it. The light.

The BabyHatch is lit up.

Somehow, I get a sense this is all connected – the BMW, the junky car, the dead man, the baby.

Because there is a baby.

I walk towards the hatch and my body’s in slow motion. The child’s asleep, sucking its thumb. No one has come yet. Why has no one come yet?

I realise without realising that I’ve got the tyre lever in my hand. I move without moving to prise open the hatch. It is easy. I lift out the baby and she’s as light as a star.

Then we zoom back a little while to discover how the baby got there, and the plot does indeed closely follow The Winter’s Tale, albeit modernised in various ways. Leontes is Leo, a hedge fun manager who is rich and ruthless and rather too emotional to think about his actions properly. Hermione is MiMi, a French singer who is beautiful and fairly famous – and, as the novel opens, pregnant with the baby we will later see in the BabyHatch. Polixenes is Xeno, a video game designer – who is working on a game called The Gap of Time, in one of the few strands of the novel that I didn’t think was particularly successful.

As with Shakespeare’s play, Leo manages to convince himself that MiMi and Xeno are having an affair – and, indeed, that the baby is Xeno’s. Winterson convincingly makes him as impervious to reason as Shakespeare manages with Leontes – he has the same passions that cannot be calmed, and the same power that can turn those passions into deadly action. Interestingly, in a twist on the original that works very well and almost beguilingly, Xeno is rather lovelorn over one of the couple – but it isn’t MiMi. He is sexually very fluid, but it’s Leo who has his heart.

One thing leads to another, and Leo’s self-destructiveness sees the baby left at a hospital – but adopted by our narrator from that opening section. The second section of the novel sees Perdita retain her name from the play, though some elements of the plot have been changed since Shakespeare’s reliance on flimsy disguise and near-incest don’t translate quite as well to the twenty-first century.

I really loved this novel. Having not read any of her fiction before, I’d rather got the impression that it would be bitter and spiky and earnest. The Gap of Time certainly isn’t – there is a lovely playfulness and elegance to it, where she is having fun with the task of updating Shakespeare but also borrowing his ability to make sentences both amusing and profound.

You never feel the weight of the Bard looking over her shoulder – with the exception of when she echoes some of Shakespeare’s more idiotic comedy; the stuff that was thrown into the originals to delight the people stood in the cheapest spots.

‘[…]he found that Thebes was being terrorISed, TErrorised, terrORised – like having the Mafia come to stay – by this creature called the Sphinx.’

‘Sphinx? Isn’t that underwear?’

‘Spanx is underwear. The Sphinx was a woman – you the type: part monster, part Marilyn Monroe.’

It’s a good impersonation of the bits of Shakespeare’s plays that I tend to glaze over for – and just as glazable-overable here.

I think the first half and the final section, when we are back with Leo et al, were the most successful – I got less out of the middle bit, where we are introduced to a new and bigger cast, none of whom are quite as well defined or as interesting. But overall, her updating is both clever and engaging. The main mark of its achievement is that I would recommend The Gap of Time even to people who’d never read or heard a word of The Winter’s Tale – and it has certainly made me keen to read more by Winterson, if she is on this form elsewhere.