Leo Kaiser is
rich, he has everything he can wish for: money, a beautiful wife, MiMi, a
beloved son, a successful business. Nevertheless, there is a certain guilt that
he has been carrying around all his life: he was responsible for his best
friend Xeno’s accident when they were kids. Is this the reason why Xeno has an
affair with his wife and is the father of MiMi’s unborn child? MiMi and Xeno as
well as his business partner Paulina try to make him see reality again, but Leo
is stubborn and blinded by his anger. His rage finally leads to the
catastrophe: his best friend gone, his son dead, his wife divorced and his
daughter missing. Apart from his money, Leo has lost everything. On the other
side of the world, Perdita grows up with a loving father and a caring older
brother. She lives eighteen years not knowing what had happened to her real,
biological family. When she meets the love of her life, suddenly, all the
pieces match and add up to a completely new picture of her life.
The Gap of Time is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series and
Jeanette Winterson has created a cover form of the bard’s comedy The Winter’s Tale. The author stuck
quite close to the original: we have King Leontes - now Leo, king of a business
imperium called Sicily; Hermione, his beautiful wife has become lovely singer
MiMi; Polixenes, Leo’s childhood friend and later enemy shows up as Xeno; his
son Florizel is now represented as Zel; the noblewoman Paulina who secretly
holds the reins in both stories; and Shep(herd) and his son Clo(wn) who raise
Perdita, the lost daughter. The plot itself has been placed into the computer
game world of London and a bit refreshed to give the impression of a modern
story. Albeit the story is known and the happy-end could be expected, I enjoyed
the novel because Jeanette Winterson has a virtuous way of using language
creating humorous and sharp puns and she does not refrain from openly alluding
to Shakespeare himself. The comedy is downright entertaining from the first to
the very last page and she absolutely managed to create characters who can
surprise us, even though we are quite familiar with them, and seem to be
authentic and imaginable as real persons.
Again, we
can see also in this novel that Shakespeare’s plays can easily stand the test
of time. Quite obviously, we have not developed any further during the last 400
years and are still governed by basic emotions such as love, pride, anger, desire,
sadness and fear. Those universal sensations can easily be transferred to other
places and times and do not lose any of their impact on human behaviour. One
really has to congratulate the people behind Hogarth Shakespeare for picking
gifted authors who make something new by respecting all that Shakespeare stands
for. I am really looking forward to Jo Nesbo retelling Hamlet and Tracy Chevalier on Othello
which both are to published in 2017.
