Imagination comes before love for this effortlessly marvellous author

STORYTELLING
One Aladdin, Two Lamps
Jeanette Winterson
Jonathan Cape, $39.99

Mrs Winterson? Are you there? I’m keen to know what you think of Jeanette’s new book. Your daughter, yes, your only daughter, the one who made you nervy because she never seemed normal. I’m sorry; she’s still not normal. But what can you expect from a child who rewrote the endings of the stories she heard to suit herself? (She’s still at it by the way).

Suiting herself. That’s what Jeanette was always about, wasn’t it? Her method of being in the world just wouldn’t coincide with yours, regardless of wrangling from you or the church. And here you were, adopting her, trying to do The Right Thing. Jeanette never understood what the Right Thing was, did she. Too normal for her!

In her new book about her life, a life which even you, Mrs Winterson, will have to admit, has been exceptional, she extemporises on the idea that we are all shaped by the stories we are told, or see, or read. She starts with the story you told her, Mrs Winterson. She says: This is how the story was supposed to go. Work hard. Do well. And anyone who ever engaged with her would see that such a girl, such an imaginative, sharp girl would do well in whatever she chose.

Except, she adds: But… I am female. I am adopted. I felt more like Aladdin than Andrew Carnegie. A lifetime of hard work would never get me out of here. I was trapped in a story I didn’t want to hear.

Well! Mrs Winterson, I have to tell you that millions of people, mainly women, will be quietly saying Hallelujah to that as they read these words. You could never quite see that your story was not her story, perhaps? Many of these quiet readers might not know that Andrew Carnegie was the Scottish steel magnate who cherished reading so deeply he endowed libraries all over the world. Real man. Fabulous idea. Everyone knows who Aladdin is; he found a lamp, his life was changed and kept changing regardless of whether he wanted it or not. Not a real man. Total fancy and fabrication.

Jeanette Winterson at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival, celebrating the 25th anniversary of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit<.i>.Credit: Corbis via Getty Images

According to your daughter, Mrs Winterson, Aladdin was a latecomer. She is more interested in the ancient stories that began around a campfire, or crossing a desert (all that sand!) and as they were told and retold they changed. As Jeanette says, new stories were tacked onto the skirts of old favourites. Fresh characters appear. And there are also new storytellers, one being Jeanette. Her exceptionality was obvious from her 1986 debut Oranges are not the Only Fruit. You would have hated it because it wasn’t kind about you. Although there is no doubt at all that you did try to love Jeanette, to do the right thing according to your ways.

But, to cut to the chase, there were books outside your house. Jeanette read them. Something happened. There was some sort of fission in your daughter’s head and the particles went everywhere. Chain reaction. Do you think it was nuclear? She calls the result imagination (she does have an explosive imagination) and she places it first in her life needs, even above love. Of course, she reveres love, but she reckons you need to have a lot of luck in that department. She says this on the very last page of her new book.

Yes, a new book, and you will not be surprised that it covers many, even much of the same thoughts that have interested/obsessed your daughter all her life. And, as you will know by now because she is deservedly admired by all the people that matter as well as many more who don’t (the normal people), her writing is always effortlessly fresh, effortlessly marvellous. But you will be keen to hear that this latest book is, well, I could say, abnormally, and frankly abominably skittish.

She is re-telling the story of Shahrazad and the Thousand Nights. You remember the stories the princess had to spin so her new husband wouldn’t have her beheaded her in the morning after their first night together? In this telling Jeanette becomes the princess herself, and she seems to be emptying out her head. Quite indiscriminatingly. She says, early on: Stories have a way of escaping. Recombining. Defying neatness. Mrs Winterson, I imagine she would have been a very untidy child, difficult for you? Dead things under the bed and all that? She goes on to talk about the untidy exuberance of these stories, so I think you’ll be able to take a breath of vindication.

Untidy exuberance is the key to your daughter’s new book. It is fascinating because she is fascinating, but, Mrs Winterson, there were times when I wondered if I mightn’t cut off her head for a bit because the whole thing is so terribly UNTIDY and EXUBERANT. I’m sure you’d agree. It is exasperating.

But, heavens, isn’t she a brilliant thing? I learned a lot. And she’s spot on about imagination.

I feel that she and Arundati Roy (have you met her mother, Mrs Roy? I believe she’s currently in the same place you are) really have got originality and expression AND mothers all sewn up. Shahrazads for our times.

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I hope you agree, Mrs Winterson. Now I have to work out where in the Ether I can send this. (Or do the dead have Zoom? ). I will send the book as well because it is attractive, rather like Picasso being Bloomsbury. See what happens when you read? You start to sound like the book. Oh, and there’s a terrific book by a young Irish writer called Rooney. Her book is called Normal People. I’ll enclose it with this.

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