Observer review: The PowerBook by Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson's new novel, The PowerBook, is a virtuoso trip into virtual reality

The PowerBook
Jeanette Winterson
Jonathan Cape £14.99, pp243
Buy it at BOL

Jeanette Winterson has changed her name. She is Jeanette.Winterson and her new novel is The PowerBook. It looks like an Apple Mac manual. The first impression is of confident, wacky gimmickry. The chapters have headings such as: 'Open Hard Drive', 'New Document', 'Search', 'Show Balloons', 'Chooser' and 'Really Quit?'. There is even one called 'Empty Trash'.

The narrator offers, by e-mail, 'Freedom just for one night', to become someone else through fiction. Winterson is about to prance into virtual reality, fearing nothing. She is going on-line (not for real, Cape remain her publishers). But she is about to put herself on the line - more than ever before. There seems every reason to sign on cautiously.

It takes no more than a page or two before it becomes marvellously clear that Winterson has no future as a boffin. The computer is, for her, a conceit, an invitation to explore, a way of making narratives come and go faster than the speed of light. It never holds her up or back. Her writing is graceful, jargon-free, light as thistledown.

Computers are fickle and provisional: suited, perhaps, to the telling of love stories. And yet this novel is in no way 'state of the art'; its heels are in the past, its heart outside time. It is more like a book of spells than a computer manual, written by someone determined to be a witch through words, convinced that lives are transmutable, open to the power of wishes. She believes that we can be authors of our own lives.

Love is Jeanette Winterson's subject - or the only one to which she has been faithful. Sometimes her writing about love has been fey and pretentious (I could not get on with The Passion and its cute Napoleonic posturing), sometimes brave and true (Written on the Body was an extraordinary, extended love letter).

There is something gallant about Winterson's persistence - she has never been a faint-hearted romantic. She has never stopped trying to unriddle love: The Passion, Sexing the Cherry, Written on the Body are all romantic crusades. And Winterson's lesbian identity is essential to this: she writes with the zeal of a St George liberating a princess from the dragon's mouth.

Indeed The PowerBook reads, more than anything, like a rescue operation. She is resolved to salvage love from everything that endangers it. But she knows - it is a refrain: 'There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet.' The Christian overtone recalls Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant and although her wit is not Wildean (it is all her own), she does share his romantic, quasi-religious morbidity. She knows what lovers are up against.

In The PowerBook, the narrator and her punter fall in love in a range of imaginary incarnations, in several different countries and periods of history. There is only one aspect to this that is irritatingly tricksy: the sustained pretence that the novel is 'interactive', that it has two authors or more. Winterson tries for audience participation, collars us directly. But her 'you and me' has an uneasy facility. This is because there can be no doubt about who is in charge. Winterson writes with evangelical assurance, vaulting ambition, total control. Sometimes the book reads like a DIY bible. She is the only one with her hands on the keyboard.

The story starts in 1591. A young woman is about to import tulips from Turkey to Holland. She disguises herself as a boy, the tulip bulbs are convincingly stitched into her trousers. It is a lightly fanciful idea - in the virtual world, anything goes. A woman can become a man, as Winterson puts it, 'by a little horticultural grafting'.

Then follows a wonderful scene aboard a ship on which the tulip-boy is travelling. The Islamic captain advises (while eating chicken) on the unreality of the material world and as he does so - to perfect his point - lightly tosses the chicken carcass into the waves. He says: 'You will live in this world as though it is real, until it is no longer real, and then you will know, as I do, that all your adventures and all your possessions, and all your losses, and what you have loved - this gold, this bread, the green glass sea - were things you dreamed as surely as you dreamed of buffalo and watercress.'

The captain is a master of virtual reality before its time and there is something uplifting and moving about the lightness of his speech. At its best, the writing takes your breath away: the coquettish philosophising, the elegance and caprice, the ability to move easily between the metaphysical and the visible world - and even to crack good jokes without doing any structural damage to the story. And when the tulip boy has to instruct a princess in the erotic arts, the tulip proves surprisingly potent. Winterson gets away with murder - or should that be love?

She writes: 'The partition between real and invented is as thin as a wall in a cheap hotel room.' And the idea that all circumstantial detail is a mirage is part of the pleasure of the book. Life in Paris is full of details that seem too vividly incidental to have been invented: the pair of Dalmatians, the buskers playing Vivaldi on the metro blocking the exits and entrances, the French waiter who flares his nostrils with 'that hotel trade mixture of servility and disgust'.

In Capri, Winterson tells the marvellous story of a frisbee that lands on a statue of the Madonna, giving her a halo she was not bargaining for. At times, reading the novel is like being on a strange package holiday with a wonderfully unreliable guide. It comes as no surprise when, in the tradition of Thomas Hardy and John Fowles, Winterson offers alternative endings to her chimerical story.

Jeanette Winterson is like the ancient (or not-so-ancient) mariner: she holds us with her glittering eye and, even when we doubt her, we must hear her out. But unlike the ancient mariner, she is too witty, original, and good at what she does to spoil any wedding party.

Contributor

Kate Kellaway

The GuardianTramp

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