Hardback by Hogarth, £16.99 (ebook £8.49)
The Gap Of Time is Jeanette Winterson’s moving, pacy “cover version” of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1611). This is a clever book that explores themes of love, loss, and forgiveness as parents screw up their children and do the unthinkable.
In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes’ misplaced jealousy (he thinks his wife, Hermione, is having an affair with his best friend) causes him to abandon his baby daughter, Perdita, and kill his wife (or so we think). Sixteen years later, he gets the chance of atonement.
In Winterson’s witty and funky adaptation, Shakespeare’s characters are transplanted to a modern-day America of poverty and racial politics and to London and Paris, post-financial crash. Hermione (now Mimi) is a singer (we get her Wikipedia entry) and Leo a capitalist and property developer. Perdita (little lost one) becomes a feisty, no-nonsense heroine whose journey to make sense of her origins becomes a mystery story and adventure romp.
The play and the re-telling are personal – “It’s a play about a foundling. And I am … and how forgiveness and the future are tied together in both directions,” Winterson writes – and the playful treatment of time will be familiar to readers of her Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1985).
A thrilling read.
