The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson

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It is not easy to create a piece of fiction that is based on someone else’s work. There are the inevitable comparisons. So, I give the writers recruited by Hogarth Shakespeare a lot of credit. Not only have they been asked to create such pieces, but their works are based on the works of the best-known English playwright.

By Mariusz Kubik, http://www.mariuszkubik.pl [Attribution, GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

In The Gap of Time, Dame Jeanette Winterson has taken on “A Winter’s Tale.” This is not one of Shakespeare’s best known, or most loved plays. Its plot is complicated, and its themes are jealousy, and mistrust. Unlike his tragedies, Shakespeare uses his stage to write about forgiveness. Briefly, there are accusations of infidelity, banishment, death and rebirth. For a full recap you can check out Spark Notes or another source.

Ms. Winterson has taken on a formidable task, and has created a good if not great in work in response. In the end notes she writes of how the themes of jealousy and forgiveness speak to her. She has moved many of the less important aspects of the original story to the background in order to write a tale focused on affects of jealousy on relationships. Beyond lovers, Ms. Winterson presents the green monster and its influence on friendships and the relationship between parents and children.

We meet Leo, head of a real estate development firm in London. He suspects that his wife, Mimi, and his best friend, Xeno, are having an affair. We follow Leo’s descent into temporary madness. His obsession takes over all aspects of his life. We are given an excellent trip through Leo’s head. The writing becomes more frenetic as Leo’s paranoia takes hold. As his thoughts darken, Ms. Winterson’s writing becomes ultra-focused, her sentences and paragraphs become shorter. We are enveloped in the green monster along with Leo.

Unfortunately, the rest of the book doesn’t quite live up to this first section. Maybe it is easier to write about the passion of jealousy than the thoughtfulness of forgiveness. It doesn’t help that Shakespeare has woven the weakest threads of this story into the last two-thirds of the play. There are many things events that were put into the play to move the plot along, but that do not really make sense in the story, and these were difficult to write around. Ms. Winterson does a good job in trying to keep the story together, but sometimes it does get away from her. There are just too many anomalies to allow the story to develop to the crescendo that it deserves.

If you are a someone, as I am, who likes to read adaptations. Then go ahead, and dig in. If you enjoy exploring how one writer can take the ideas of another and make them their own, then enjoy. I did. 

A Million Fragile Bones by Connie May Fowler

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In A Million Fragile Bones, Connie May Fowler has brought the beauty and lyricism of her fiction writing to the world of memoir. What is even better for this reader, she has done so in order to bring forward a topic of great importance that has been shoved to the background of the recent past – the effects of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

Disclaimer – I know Connie May Fowler personally. She has taught several writer’s workshops in which The Amazing Ms. D participated.

Connie May Fowler was born and raised on the coasts of Florida, first in St. Augustine, and then, after the death of her father, in Tampa. In the mid 1980’s she returned to St. Augustine. Several years of living in Kansas made her yearn for Florida and the ocean, so she came back home. She was also looking for connections to her father, who had died when she was just 6 years old.

After several years in St. Augustine, Ms. Fowler was still feeling unsettled, and while driving across the northern Gulf Coast of Florida, she stumbled across a house for sale on a spit of land called Alligator Point. She knew immediately she had found her home.

The first two-thirds of A Million Fragile Bones are a wonderful and engaging description of Ms. Fowler’s life. She brings the full force of her fiction skills to bear. Whether it is describing her reaction to the abuse received at the hands of her mother;

…No matter the violence or ridicule, write everything down because even at six, seven, eight, nine, ten, twelve, a child knows the power of words.

            Yes. Unending avalanche. Worlds spawned from consonants and vowels, syllables and phrases. Words upon words – prayers for the hopeless, prayers for the beaten, prayers for the poor, prayers for the fatherless, prayers for the two girls who wished their mother dead, prayers for a mother who Appalachian childhood had been so flamed with cruelty, rising from the ashes was never an option – piled up all around me, but I kept writing.(p. 21)

Or the peace and joy she achieved spending her days among the plants and animals that inhabit Alligator Point and her life:

Perhaps all of us exist in a perpetual migratory state. Our minds are wandering to where they need to be at any given moment – a happy memory, the right word, a daydream. Our hearts, too, surprise us with sudden love, sudden hate, needs and desires we did not know we possessed until we feel that telltale plumpness rise in our chests like fresh bread. (p. 93)

The beauty of prose that inhabits this book are a rare find in a memoir. It is worth reading A Million Fragile Bones for the feelings of love and joy written about in prose that just took me out of myself during these sections.

But that is not all Ms. Fowler has to offer. On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform, owned by BP, exploded and caught fire. This began what is probably the worst ecological disaster in U.S. history. For almost 90 days the well spewed close to 1 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico every day.

It is in this last third of A Million Fragile Bones that Ms. Fowler’s writing truly amazes. She conveys the initial fear of listening to news reports as it becomes clear that everyone has been lied to about the seriousness of the situation. Lied to by BP and by the federal government. She writes through the anger that develops as it becomes harder and harder to get real information from BP or the authorities. The anger that grows as she realized that there is a huge coverup going on. She presents the utter devastation as living on the Gulf harder and then impossible. The number of dead animals begins to grow exponentially, while her own health suffers due to the presence of oil and dispersant in the environment.

A Million Fragile Bones is a must read. In this new political age, it has become easy to forget or ignore the disasters of the past, even as they continue to affect us today.

The Girl in the Spider's Web by David Lagercrantz

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A Swedish computer genius’ life is under threat. The NSA is hacked. It is going to take a computer expert to bring all of these strands together. Welcome back Lisbeth Salander.

After Stieg Larsson’s death in 2004 like many fans of the Millennium Series, I was afraid that I had lost Lisbeth, Mikael Bloomkvist and the rest of the characters I had grown to love. David Lagercrantz brought them back in 2015’s The Girl in the Spider’s Web and gave them a new mystery to solve.

For those unfamiliar with the Millennium Series here are the main two characters. Lisbeth Salander is the daughter of an abusive father who is a Russian defector. Her father is given complete protection by Säpo, the Swedish secret Service, which allows him to terrorize Lisbeth and her mother. At the age of 12, Lisbeth, having witnessed too much of his violence, takes revenge and sets her father on fire. Mikael Bloomkvist is an investigative journalist for the magazine Millennium. He is known for writing blockbuster pieces that expose corruption in Swedish society. Most recently he has been greatly aided by Lisbeth.

The Girl in the Spider’s Web is the first book in the series written by Mr. Lagercrantz. Here we meet Frans Balder, a master computer programmer who has quit his job to return to Sweden to take care of his autistic son. He has also taken his research into Artificial Intelligence with him. Balder is warned that his life and work are danger from a secret criminal organization called “the Spiders” who are led by the mysterious Thanos. In hope of shedding light on his work and the threats against him, Baldor arranges to meet Mikael Bloomkvist. Meanwhile, Lisbeth Salander has been trying to hunt down The Spiders for her own reasons. In her efforts she has helped a group of hackers to break into the NSA’s intranet, and given her information on the threat to Baldor. As all of this comes together, Lisbeth’s past pops up to play a significant role in the investigation.

It is not easy to pick up someone else’s work and carry it on. Mr. Lagercrantz has done a very good job adapting our familiar and loved characters to his voice. This is even more true since we now have not only a new author, but a new translator also. As with any change, the new tone of the novel is a little disconcerting at first. One review in Upsala Nya Tidning described the portrayal of Lisbeth and Mikael as “more brooding” and “less cartoonish.” My impression of the reinterpretation of these characters is the opposite. To me this novel is much less dark. This may be because it is more plot driven than character driven than the previous novels. I am not sure if this is a result of the original writing, the new translator or both.

It is true that by the fourth book of a series, characters have a set of personality traits that well defined. That does not mean that characters should not grow. Unfortunately, there is little growth in this novel. It is a good mystery. The plot is compelling. It held my attention and was fun to read. But neither Lisbeth nor Mikael develop or change. There is nothing that moves them forward as people. This book could stand alone, and while there are some references that a new reader might miss, it would not affect the mystery in any way. The problem is that having read the previous books I was looking for new pieces in the personalities of my “friends” I did not find them here.