Do you believe in ghosts?” In introducing her new collection of ghost stories, Jeanette Winterson begins with what might seem the obvious question. Is it, though? In fiction, the suspension of disbelief is usually a tacit arrangement. The writer gets on with the business of invention, leaving the reader to deliberate in private on matters of plausibility. In ghost stories, as in other speculative genres, this implicit contract seems all the more vital. For one thing, our beliefs are neither here nor there. We can enjoy a space opera without accepting that faster-than-light travel is possible (though no one seems to have told the users of Reddit). And in the finest ghost stories – like, say, The Turn of the Screw – the central question is left both unstated and forever unresolved.
I bring all this up because Winterson herself brings it up, and does so repeatedly. Concluding her introduction on a coyly agnostic note, she quotes Samuel Johnson: “All reason is against it, but all belief is for it.” She returns, once the stories are under way, as if to supervise our studies. In a sequence of editorial interventions, she relates uncanny anecdotes of her own. She asserts her ambivalence (“I don’t know – and that’s the best answer I can give”) only to quickly renounce it (“Many of us have experienced telepathy”). She makes intriguing connections between mind-body dualism and AI technology, then veers without warning into fringy prognostication. “Computing technology,” she declares, will not only “realign our relationship with death” but enable us to “defeat” it. These are strong claims, though in fiction – presented as imagined possibilities – such propositions would not trouble us in the slightest. So, when Winterson goes on to do just that, in the sequence of stories labelled “Devices”, her edgy predictions inevitably become hostages to her own persuasiveness of vision. They don’t fare all that well.
