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.”
