The implausibility of boundaries has always fascinated Jeanette Winterson. In fiction and nonfiction she has been drawn to the moments at which they are defiantly porous, or contingent, or straightforwardly illogical, constructed only to impose restrictions and deny freedom of movement, mental and physical. A concurrent interest in the similar limitations of an easily defined shared reality has shaped her work, from novels such as 1997’s Gut Symmetries – its title a play on the idea of instinctive feeling and the grand unifying theories of physics – to her most recent collection of essays, 12 Bytes, in which she explores the profound impact that artificial intelligence (AI) will have on human life.
It is unsurprising that she should be attracted to stories of ghosts, both for their abiding interest in the existence of a different world to the one we claim to see every day and for the sinuous strand they weave through literary history (what else is Septimus Smith, the shell-shocked soldier in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, but a haunted man, glimpsed on the way to becoming a ghost of himself?). Night Side of the River features a baker’s dozen of spooky stories organised into the four categories of Devices, Places, People and Visitations – the distinctions themselves boasting somewhat leaky boundaries – in which Winterson takes loving liberties with the form. Abandoned dower houses with forbidden locked rooms, the scent of cigarettes in nonsmoking households, antique transistor radios that suddenly burst into life and spectral soldiers from long-past conflicts abound: as Paul, who makes a living putting on ghostly weekends for wealthy partygoers notes: “We’re looking for walled-up ancestors, wronged wives, pale-faced children trailing a teddy, a drunk uncle who fell to his doom.”
These are the well-trodden imaginative territories of the fireside yarn-spinner, the gothic novelist, the Victorian spiritualist and the modernist subjectivity-warper; influences range from The Epic of Gilgamesh and the work of both MR and Henry James to Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, Somerset Maugham in his occasional supernatural mode and Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black. Elsewhere, as the grouping Devices suggests, we break ground in the metaverse, as AI dares us to imagine a “reality” beyond the material where, for example, an abusive spouse might continue to torment his widow via an app or a fed-up wife can reimagine her disappointing husband as altogether more successful, handsome and appreciative merely by refining his avatar.
But even when the references feel familiar – a remote coastal hotel in which a wedding is disrupted by the spirits of a pair of star-crossed lovers, for instance – Winterson avoids pastiche, largely through the steady release of intensely portrayed and skilfully deployed emotion. A pair of pieces, No Ghost Ghost Story and The Undiscovered Country, show us bereavement from both sides, as Simon mourns his recently dead partner, William. “Absurd that the shelves are restocked every day,” he ponders as he forlornly buys milk, “but you will never come back,” capturing precisely the incredulity of grief; he is haunted not by a ghost, but by the lack of one. “We were the originators and makers of the shared life that we worked on every day. Now, I have to work on it alone.” The companion story is, perhaps, an exercise in consolation, as Winterson implies that ghosts may be present even when we do not believe in them.
Punctuating the stories are four autobiographical vignettes in which Winterson recounts her own experiences with the otherworldly, including two pieces about the death of her grandmother, who appeared to have wandered into her beloved rose garden at the moment of departure, despite in fact being entirely bedridden. No such accounts would be complete without the arrival of the author’s mother – so familiar to us from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and the memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?. “The whole endeavour of our family life,” says Winterson, “was to call things by other names,” and recalls that Mrs Winterson would never admit that their house was prone to mice, which spoke of poverty and uncleanliness. Whenever one was seen skittering behind the larder, she issued a single word: “Ectoplasm.” Which proves that, on top of all their other attributes, ghosts can be terribly useful.
• Night Side of the River by Jeanette Winterson is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
