Jeanette Winterson

02/11/2009

The fierce and celebrated author gets her teeth into new role as kids' writer

 BY THOMAS QUINN

All right, I’ll admit it: The prospect of talking to Jeanette Winterson made me very nervous. It was only on the phone, but as I picked up the receiver I was fully aware of the Accrington-raised, Oxford-educated novelist’s reputation as an intellectual stormtrooper - and my hand trembled.

Is my vocabulary up to this? Should I memorise some Latin or a sonnet?

After all, Winterson has spent her entire career being the bolshy one. In the homophobic 1980s, when the Thatcher government sponsored the infamous Clause 28, she was a 24-year-old lesbian writing frankly about a love affair she had at 16. The Daily Mail really hasn’t left her alone since.

That book, the semi-autobiographical Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, earned her a slew of awards, including the Whitbread, and the acclaim was widely said to have gone to her head.

In the decades since, her literary output has never slackened – she also writes for film and TV. She once declared on Newsnight Review that she was the heir to Virginia Woolf and she has even been known to hunt literary critics down at their homes to challenge them in person about a bad review.

But as it happens, Winterson turns out to be as funny and warm as she is intellectually fierce. Now that she has turned 50, is she mellowing?

“I don’t know what’s happening, its as much a surprise to me as to you that I should be writing for children, not having any of my own,” she says.

Of her new illustrated book The Lion, The Unicorn and Me she explains playfully: “I love Christmas and I thought it would be interesting to retell the Christmas story from the donkey’s point of view. Plus, as the donkey is me, the storyteller, I rather liked the idea of having a golden nose.”

There’s even the trace of a laugh when I point out that her new children’s novel, The Battle of the Sun, follows on from 2006’s Tanglewreck, despite the fact she once claimed “sequels are for when a writer runs out of ideas.”

“Oh I don’t think of this as a sequel,” she ripostes. “There are some characters that overlap, but I don’t think of this as Silver’s story, it is really Jack’s. Because the events of this book happen before the other one, you can’t exactly call it a sequel.”

In The Battle of the Sun, Silver, a young 21^st century girl, is thrust bafflingly into would-be apprentice printer Jack’s Elizabethan London of1601, inhabited by magicians and dragons.

Tanglewreck was a major departure for Winterson, whose themes in her ‘adult’ books tend to be dominated by love and sex, and came about after discussions with her two godchildren.

“They kept asking why adults didn’t have enough time, and I wondered what it would be like if someone owned time, like a commodity,” she says.

“I wanted to show them that history is all around us. I live in London in Spitalfields, a Georgian area, but you can see the cart tracks from the Elizabethan period. It is all there, layered up around us.”

In the new novel, the mysterious Magus, an alchemist who plans to turn London into gold, kidnaps Jack. Typically, she doesn’t just see this as ‘fantasy’ (a word she objects to anyway, because it is too vague), but as a theme relevant to our own time.

“Alchemists were concerned with three things: turning everything into gold; creating a homunculus, a living thing in a bottle; and the elixir of life,” says Winterson.

“I’d say their concerns are still prevalent today: what has the credit crunch been about but trying to turn the entire world into money? And medical science is obsessed with divorcing childbirth from a woman’s body and with prolonging life and youth.”

Even when she is having fun with the kids, Winterson’s fearsome intellect is whirring away.

The Battle of the Sun (Bloomsbury, £6.99, ages 9+) and The Lion, The Unicorn and Me (Scholastic, £12.99, ages 3+) are out now