Jeanette Winterson’s ‘The Gap of Time’ retells Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, transposing it into modernity. We are introduced to a Shep and Clo, a black widower and his son in Louisiana, and move away towards Londoners Leo and Xeno, whose complicated homoerotic relationship leads to disaster, and MiMi (or Hermione), Leo’s wife, who is the ill-fated object of desire for both men. As in the play, everything unravels with the birth of a girl, and comes full circle in the end. 

The story begins with an energetic immediacy, and then bisects, pulling the reader into multiple, fomenting directions. Seemingly arbitrary chapters find their way together naturally, cleverly. Readers are given the bare bones of Shakespeare’s original plot, and Winterson elaborates inventively for us, supplying slightly altered characters and adjusting to circumstances closer to ours. What may concern readers is the anti-climatic ending, but it is difficult for any happy ending to come out as anything but after an almost Wagnerian conflict dominating the majority of the novel. That focal issue, which is the same one in Shakespeare’s original, is captivating.

Though the action itself can seem jumbled and a bit contrived (particularly towards the end), Winterson compensates by giving food for thought through her passages reflecting on time, a trope important to Shakespeare himself in The Winter’s Tale and many other plays. Her reflections on the time and verity of time in the universe add a smooth flowing quality to the plot, bringing the occasional improbability of real life naturally into fiction. Equally lyrical are her references to the poet Gérard de Nerval, making it an interesting contemporary read for modern-day Romantics. Winterson’s exploration of the idea of eternal ‘falling’ is also an interesting concept.

Leaving aside a few instances of awkwardness and character superficiality (actions seem to matter above all else and motivation is only briefly touched on), Winterson excels in dramatic poeticism of plot and does add something to Shakespeare in the 21^st century, making his work more tangible and close to contemporary readers.