The Gap of Time: William Shakespeare' The Winter's Tale Retold: A Novel (Hogarth Shakespeare)

The Gap of Time was the first entry, published last year, in the Hogarth Shakespeare series. This is the project that has modern writers reimagining the Bard's plays in modern settings.This book is a reimagining - or, in Winterson's own words, a cover - of Shakespeare's play, The Winter's Tale. It is one of his late plays, usually classified as a romance. It starts in tragedy and ends in comedy with everyone, but for two notable exceptions, living happily every after. The tragedy part of the play deals in some heavy psychological drama and the comedy part is replete with Shakespeare's famous misdirections and misunderstandings that are all cleared up in the end.At least this is what I gather from the Wiki information about the play, for, in truth, I have not read it nor have I ever seen a production of it. Neither have I ever read any of Winterson's work, so I come to the book as a complete virgin.The center of Shakespeare's tale is King Leontes of Sicilia. Winterson turns him into Leo, a fabulously wealthy, arrogant and utterly paranoid hedge fund manager in London in the era after the 2008 financial crash.Sixteen years before, his best friend had been Xeno (Shakespeare's King Polixenes of Bohemia) who is now a gay, introverted video game designer. In Winterson's telling the two had had a sexual relationship as teenagers.When we first meet him, Leo is married to MiMi, a popular singer-songwriter, who is mother of his son, Milo, and now heavily pregnant with another child. In his paranoia, Leo becomes convinced that the soon-to-be born child is not his, that his wife and Xeno have been having an affair and that he is the father.He tries to kill Xeno by running him down in a parking garage and then goes home and rapes his wife. She goes into labor and gives birth to a daughter, whom Leo rejects and gives to one of his employees to deliver to Xeno.Plans go awry, of course. The messenger with the baby is killed after he leaves the baby in a BabyHatch at a hospital because he senses he is about to be attacked. A man named Shep and his son Clo find the baby when they stop to change a tire next to the hatch. Shep, who has recently lost his wife, takes the baby and the bag left with her that contains money and jewels. As his son later said, "he fell in love with that baby and the baby healed him," and Shep raises the child as his own.Through too many misdirections to recount here, sixteen years later, the foundling named Perdita meets Xeno and his son Zel - and, of course, falls in love with Zel - and eventually is reunited with her now penitent and lonely father. And, bottom line, all (or at least most) wounds are healed and everything is made right once again.I really appreciated Winterson's writing. She made everything in this very convoluted tale zip along with her beautiful and seemingly effortless prose. She was able to capture the complex emotions of the characters and to build the story scene by scene so that those characters attained a certain heft and they all emerged intact from a complicated and satisfying contemporary tale that I think even Shakespeare might enjoy.I don't mean to imply that the tale is perfect. There are a few clunky and awkward passages, but, on the whole, it was a thoroughly enjoyable read. It stands along all the other "covers" that I have read in this project, every one of which I have found to be entertaining. Now I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

I’ve followed Hogarth’s new series of rewritings of Shakespeare by eminent authors with great interest. Four have been published to date –Howard Jacobson’s Shylock Is My Name (The Merchant of Venice), Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl (The Taming of the Shrew), Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (The Tempest), and this one, Jeanette Winterson’s reworking of The Winter‘s Tale.I gave strongly positive reviews to the other three books in the series but must give a qualified one to this. The Winter‘s Tale is not one of the plays by Shakespeare with which I am familiar but in many respects its plot is troubling, out there, outlandish yet moving. It stretches reality farther than most of the Bard’s plays, which is already saying a lot. (The life lived by most Shakespeare characters is hyperlife, not the kind of life we --ordinary mortals—live.) A king becomes convinced that his wife is pregnant by his best friend. He hands the daughter over to be abandoned (but she’s saved), his wife dies, his friend leaves him. Then years later, through an extraordinary series of coincidences, father and daughter are reunited, the mother too, and all is well in the world. (It’s too much!)Winterson, a prolific author of fiction and nonfiction, is a good choice for this story. I t begs not to be treated as real but rather as a type of hyperbole, which through its virtuoso display of writing, acquires a truth value of its own –not true but not not-true. That’s the type of fiction writer Winterson is, a word worker and experimentalist, who is at ease with shifts in persona and tense and narrative line. She has situated her version of the play in modern London, time not quite certain but around now, in a new American city called New Bohemia. Leo is a magnate –driven and crude and once possessed of an idea, unable to back down. His wife Mimi is both his love and a possession but all is well –or as well as it can be when living with a man with a reduced emotional palette—until he becomes convinced his wife is having an affair with his best friend and sometime lover Xeno. Then everything happens just as it does in the play: out the wife, baby abandoned but rescued by a stranger, Theo gone, the magnate all alone. Years later, the past surfaces and it’s a complicated mess.The story is hard to follow in Shakespeare, harder still with Winterson. The text hops around a lot –changes of setting, perspective, tone, the interjection of her own comments to create a not too coherent metatext. The quality of the prose is uneven, some passages sharp and brilliant, others almost Victorian Purple Prose of the worst, most clotted variety. (They’re usually describing the love affair of Perdita, the missing daughter, and Xeno’s son Zel.) I cringed when I read this sentence: “Love is the unfamiliar name behind the hands that wove the intolerable shirt of flame.” Sounds good, means little.The book is almost redeemed by the final section, which brings daughter and mother together and weaves around the narrative a discussion of what the play means in its author’s world. In the space of a few pages, Winterson crafts an insightful and poetic appraisal of the play, its theme, and its impact on us.

I bought this after reading Margaret Atwood's Hag-seed and discovering the Hogarth Shakespeare Project (which I'm ashamed to say had passed me by.) This is Winterson's masterly re-telling of A Winter's Tale. It follows the plot of the original closely. King Leontes is now Leo Keiser, a city whizz-kid, his wife Hermione - the victim of his unsound jealousy - is MiMi, a famous singer, and the infamous 'bear' in the stage directions is a couple of violent thugs who finish off the hapless bearer of the young Perdita to far off lands. So far, so Shakespeare. But The Gap of Time is a very modern tale of love, loss, regret and re-creation, written in exquisitely beautiful prose, that explores the human condition with all its flaws. A Winter's Tale is often thought of as a difficult play because of Leontes's irrational and unjustifiable behaviour (he does not even have a handkerchief, like poor Othello, to persuade him of his wife's guilt; it comes out of nothing) and the weird ending when a statue appears to come to life. Winterson copes with all this brilliantly and compellingly so that all of Shakespeare's creativity, coincidence and, yes, stage directions, are smoothly incorporated into a moving and utterly believable story. When there is so much trash and poor writing out there nowadays, treat yourself and read this beautiful book..

“There are only three possible endings to a story…” Jeanette Winterson tells us at the end of this enchanting novel, “… Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness.“Shakespeare knew all about revenge and tragedy.“Towards the end of his working life he became interested in forgiveness – or rather, he became interested again in forgiveness…”He’d given us stages heaped with bodies in Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear, though in the latter there is forgiveness too, as Winterson points out, in the person of Cordelia. In The Winter’s Tale, his penultimate play, he concentrated on forgiveness. Leontes’ wild and irrational jealousy of his wife Hermione turns to her destruction, as did Othello’s of Desdemona – but in the later play, Hermione is restored to us in a moment that comes directly out of a fairy tale. Indeed, we’re even asked by her friend Paulina, who will do the wondrous deed, to suspend our disbelief:“It is requir’d you do awake your faith.”Paulina seems to be speaking to the other characters on stage but isn’t this, in reality, a wink to us in the audience, as though to say, “it doesn’t matter that this ending is pure fantasy, go with it and you’ll enjoy the story all the more”?So Hermione returns to life and we’re sent home with a tear in our eye, as all the characters forgive each other for the harm they have done, and set out on the next stage of their lives of which we can see nothing – the gap of time.A fairy tale ending, but with a difference, as Winterson makes clear:“… in a fairy tale the threat usually comes from the outside – a dragon or an army or an evil sorcerer. Shakespeare, anticipating Freud, puts the threat where it really is: on the inside.”Why all this talk of Shakespeare? Because what Winterson has done in this remarkable novel is to write, as she says, a ‘cover’ of The Winter’s Tale. It’s part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series being published by Vintage, in which leading modern writers retell Shakespeare tales to mark the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death.In Winterson's novel, Leontes’ realm of Sicilia has become a hedge fund by that name, working out of the City of London, driven, ambitious and ruthless (and that goes for its head, Leo, as much as for the company itself). Polyxenes has become Xeno, manic designer of computer games, Leo’s closest friend and former gay lover from their schooldays. Hermione is Mimi, a French singer, and it’s her closeness to Xeno that precipitates Leo’s insane jealousy, until he finally cannot believe the child she’s carrying is his own. Where Leontes banished the newborn babe to be exposed and die in Bohemia, Leo sends the child to Xeno in New Bohemia, a place near New Orleans and strikingly similar to it, where she is lost – and therefore earns her name of Perdita, shared with the Shakespearean character.Instead of being rescued by a shepherd and his son Clown, Perdita is taken in and brought up by the grieving widower Shepherd and his son Clo. Shepherd uses the money he finds with the baby to open a bar, restaurant and music venue where, sixteen years later, she meets and falls in love with Xeno’s son Zel (Florizel in the play). Their love will be the catalyst that brings all the characters together for the final climactic moment of rediscovery and forgiveness.And we’re left to muse on the nature of time – Winterson quotes Faulkner, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” And also on the other great theme of the book, alongside time, which Winterson explains in another comment on Shakespeare’s play:“Hermione does the thing most difficult to do to right a wrong situation: nothing. Nothing is the key word of the play.”Out of a lot time, and a measure of nothing, by means of a cover version of Shakespeare’s original, Winterson gives us a delightful, enthralling, moving and thought-provoking novel. Not to be missed.

I loved this book and strongly recommend it. I love that the book was inspired by A Winters Tale, one of the best known and most often performed of Shakespeare's late plays. Not only did this book give me an insight into the original, but very soon, I was lost in the contemporary world of intrigue, drama and love. Jeanette Winterson has created a modern story with tremendous dynamism and focus, All of the characters are very real. It is a wonderfully fast moving tale which carries one along, sometimes laughing, sometimes (often) crying. I always love her writing and this is one of the best reads I have had recently.

I knew nothing about Shakespeare's 'The Winter's Tale', so the summary at the start was great. Then Jeanette W's re-telling of the story in modern times took me to another place - it really flowed.The gritty graphic parts might not be to everybody's taste, and I didn't like the gaming parts, but overall I found it a stunning absorbing book.

My third Winterson novel. And how different from the two that I know. And loved.It's a beautiful, uplifting book. A story of loss and of repair. A story of blind jealousy and rage. A story of love and forgiveness.Considering the present backdrop of hate in our real world it's refreshing to read a story full of hope where one can still believe that repentance can help heal the scars of the past and the future generation are our chance that the world might just change.Jeanette, what would I do to meet you and shake your hand....? Thank you. My own little Perdita thanks you too.