New fictionDot love


By Jeanette Winterson.

Jonathan Cape; 243 pages; £14.99

IS THAT the title? Does it include the author's name? So the book's cover suggests. The ambiguity is deliberate. One of the conceits of this fiction is that the story writes its author as much as the author writes the story. Here the idea is worked out by way of an anonymous e-mailer, who asks the “I” of the novel, a writer, for a story which will give him or her “freedom, for just one night”. In the course of the narratives that follow, the e-mailer turns up in person—a married woman. They fall in love, and the story acquires its own momentum, blurring fiction and reality—though of course we know it's all fiction anyway.

Although the novel makes much of the Internet and its language—its virtual worlds, windows behind windows, Netscape navigating and so on—the metaphor really gives little more than an up-to-the-minute spin to the familiar idea that informs so much of Ms Winterson's work: that time and space exist on many levels, that reality is plural and underdetermined, and that, just as in fiction, it confronts the possibility of multiple outcomes. Ms Winterson's preoccupation with fluidity and simultaneity has never been short of imagery: mirrors, eclipses, underground streams, maps, globes, the paranormal, quantum physics and now, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Internet.

The driving force of “The.PowerBook”, as elsewhere in her novels, is the transformative power of love, the kind that Dante calls (and she quotes him) “the love that moves the sun and the other stars”. What her “author” finds with her e-lover is potentially just such a love, the more so, we understand, for being between two women: “the subtlety of its secret—utterly the same, utterly different; I see myself, I see you, two, one, none.” Alternating with these modern episodes are variations on their theme drawn from the doomed loves and ordeals of legend and history—Launcelot and Guinevere, for example, or Mallory's ascent of Everest—together with some of Ms Winterson's own invention.

There is no mistaking Ms Winterson. She is apt to underline her own meanings: eg, “Only the impossible is worth the effort. What we seek is love itself pushing us beyond our humanity into animal instinct and god-like success.” But when she's not looking, her own strange and intense imagination can stretch ours almost to those points. Her reader has less need than she thinks for all those passages of gnomic dialogue and sonorous commentary.

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