The daylight gate

MANY READERS of Jeanette Winterson's new novel will already have traveled with her to 17th-century England in her 1990 novel "Sexing the Cherry." Like most of Winterson's work, that early book is brief, copious and sometimes astonishing - Clarendon's "History of the Rebellion" meets "Naked Lunch." In "The Daylight Gate," Winterson now puts her mind to the Pendle Hill witch trials of 1612, whose 400th anniversary has occasioned a small outpouring of fiction and poetry. The potential for widespread witchcraft hysteria was almost certainly greater in Britain than it would have been here in America at the time of Salem, 80 years later. King James I, the author of a book called "Daemonologie," believed that he himself had been targeted by witches. And eager-to-please lawyers like Thomas Potts, who drew up a report on the Pendle Hill trials, knew the highest authorities would be gratified by any connection made between black magic and the crown's other, even greater, fear - "Witchery popery popery witchery" is how Winterson has Potts pronounce the link, almost as if he too were casting a spell. Alice Nutter, a prosperous widow, was perhaps the most respectable and least flamboyant of the defendants, and in making her the protagonist of "The Daylight Gate," Winterson forthrightly acknowledges that "my Alice Nutter is not the Alice Nutter of history." Indeed, in Winterson's hands, Alice gains a bisexual glamour and a checkered career: she's the inventor of a magenta dye that attracted Queen Elizabeth's favor and a participant in alchemical studies conducted by the astrologer-scientist-philosopher John Dee. It is as part of Dee's circle that Winterson's Alice becomes erotically entangled with Elizabeth Southern - the eventual matriarch of the accused witches - as well as with the Devil himself. But Alice has long since rejected the "Left-Hand Path" to perdition and become a figure of imposing rationality: a falconer who rides "astride" instead of sidesaddle, smites local louts with her riding crop and takes a kind of economic-feminist view of the reputed witchcraft problem "If they think they are witches does that make them so?" she asks. "Such women are poor. They are ignorant. They have no power in your world, so they must get what power they can in theirs. I have sympathy for them." Alice's preternaturally youthful looks come not so much from anything diabolical as from an advance in moisturizing, the "Elixir of Youth" she was given by John Dee. She confides this beauty secret to Christopher Southworth, a Jesuit priest who has been in love with her since he was 18. The ardor is mutual, and Alice is now hiding Southworth, supposedly tortured for his participation in the 1605 Gunpowder Plot against the king, on her Lancashire estate. When his crucifix is found in Alice's bed, popery joins witchery in the ring of suspicions tightening around her. During a bit of Jacobean plea bargaining, Elizabeth Device, daughter of Elizabeth Southern, will soon be fingering Alice for a witch. The local justice of the peace, Roger Nowell, is struggling with both his dislike of King James and his own new inclination to believe in witchcraft. (Having fallen sick after the defendants punctured a little effigy of him, he's got his reasons.) A historical figure whose biography seems to have been embroidered somewhat less than the also-real Southworth's, Nowell, a widower with considerable respect for Alice, will let her go if she agrees to tell him where he can find the priest. Winterson is always a grand conjurer of ghoulish effects, sometimes backlighting them with visible merriment over her own excesses. The dungeons in this new book offer her fine opportunities: a room "piled with rats about three feet deep, eating each other"; a talking spider; a boiled head into which someone else's tongue has been sewn. A reader of "The Daylight Gate" - whose title refers to "the liminal hour" between day and night - will be vastly more entertained by it than some earlier treatments of the subject, notably William Harrison Ainsworth's 1849 novel "The Lancashire Witches," a heavy-footed production that requires cameos by Robin Hood to keep the reader awake. But Ainsworth's book is a pretty low fence for Winterson's broom to clear, and one sometimes senses that she's suffering from in-flight boredom. However delightfully gruesome that boiled head may be, the author's inventions here are never so arresting as the search, in her early novel "The Passion," for a character's actual stolen heart, or the wonderful appearance, in "Sexing the Cherry," of balloon-borne sweepers who must clean the sky of all the spoken words that cling to it like soot. Winterson's regular readers are accustomed to sudden changes in voice and point of view that announce themselves with nothing more than a line break, but in this new book dialogue can be weighted down with the chores of exposition, recap and underlining: '"You are stubborn,' said Roger Nowell. 'I am not tame,' said Alice Nutter." On a trip to London - usually a chance for Winterson to go to town in every sense - she's scarcely got the energy to place a predicate among the obligatory nouns: "Inns, taverns, bakers, cookshops, men and women smoking clay pipes carrying fish baskets on their heads." In "A Work of My Own," included in a collection of essays called "Art Objects," Winterson insists that literature be created in a heightened language and that narrative alternate temperate stretches with storms of poetic compression. "In my own fiction," she declares, "I try to drive together lyric intensity and breadth of ideas." Any reader of her work knows the extraordinary extent to which she's made good on this effort. But with the exception of a dazzlement here and a dazzlement there - the "fatty light" making its way into a cell, the eyes that "shine like fireflies in the waste ground" of a prisoner's body - the language of "The Daylight Gate" doesn't billow with much frequency or surprise. Alice remains an appealing figure, a mature and stately version of other Winterson sorceresses, someone who has experienced both the magic of magic and the magic of science. "I think we are worlds compressed into human form," she tells John Dee, as if anticipating the modern particle physics found in Winterson's "Gut Symmetries." But listen to how the heroine of that extraordinary novel, a woman who knows something about "lyric intensity," puts it: "What tales would they tell, those compressed mites. ... Breathe, all powerful one, and vanquish kingdoms as you do. Your idiot nose has sucked up Rome. Your open mouth has spewed out the Thames." In a number of Winterson's books, there is a line insisting that "what you risk reveals what you value." Her generation of English writers doesn't contain anyone nervier or more gifted, but this latest book is less risky, less witchy, than her regular readers might have expected. In "A Work of My Own," she explains her determination "to make a form that answers to 21st-century needs," something so new that she can assert, with an element of truth, "I do not write novels." That, however, is what she has done, pleasurably, with "The Daylight Gate." For almost anyone else, it would be quite good enough. ? In Winterson's hands, a woman accused of witchcraft gains a bisexual glamour. THOMAS MALLON is the author, most recently, of "Watergate: A Novel" and "Yours Ever: People and Their Letters."

*Starred Review* Winterson's novels tend to be complex and invigorating. She excels at creating provocative and satirical meshes of tradition and innovation, as in her many-faceted riff on Robinson Crusoe in The Stone Gods (2008). But here wizardly Winterson hones her storytelling to a dagger's point in an eviscerating variation on the epochal 1612 English witch trials in haunted Lancaster, a Catholic stronghold under James I, the new Protestant king. Like a witch over a cauldron, Winterson mixes historical figures (including William Shakespeare) with invented characters as she portrays a coven of horribly abused women and their starving, sexually exploited children, a desperate clan bravely defended by the mysterious and refined Alice Nutter. Wealthy, accomplished, and strangely ageless, Alice lives in solitary splendor, trusting only her falcon, and refuses to be intimated by the puffed-up witch-hunting lawyer, Thomas Potts, or the handsome, wily magistrate, Roger Nowell. But why does Alice risk all for the hideous crone, Old Demdike? Winterson summons up with forensic detail seventeenth-century filth, defilement, and torture while also conjuring occult forces and diabolical events. The result is a gripping tale of bloody religious persecution and brutal oppression of women and children, a heady and seething novel of fact, valor, magick, and love.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

To open The Daylight Gate is to be thrust into an England most Americans will have trouble believing ever existed. It's a wild, superstitious place where the king (James I, Protestant son of the very Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots) has minions who prosecute (and, arguably, persecute) people suspected of witchcraft or Catholicism. Winterson starts with the historical record-the 1612 Lancashire Witch Trial really happened-and adds poetry, possibility, Shakespeare, Elizabethan Magus John Dee, a sexy priest on the run, a lifelong love between two women, and best of all, her version of real-life accused witch Alice Nutter. Using the fact that Nutter was from a different class than the group she was tried and executed with, Winterson creates a character straight out of fantasy. Alice is vividly beautiful, suspiciously young-looking, and while not a witch herself, acquainted with what witches call the "Left-Hand Path," having worked with Dee on his alchemy and seen her female lover sell her soul to the devil, here called "the Dark Gentleman." Disliked for her power and fearlessness-she rides astride and harbors suspected witches on her land-when the hunts for Catholics and witches converge, so too do her past and present. The book is short, violent (both torture and magic are depicted with full goriness), and absorbing. The language is simple and sometimes lovely, and to say that the book could have gone the extra mile and been a graphic novel is not to damn it, but to recognize the pleasure in its intensely visual qualities. Agent: Heather Schroder, ICM. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

This short novel brings to life 17th-century England during the reign of James I at the Pendle witch trials in 1612. The presence of witchcraft is clear, and Satan appears briefly, yet the accusations against 13 women are highly politicized, much like the Salem witch trials of 1692 in America. The protagonist is Alice Nutter (a real-life victim who was recently honored with a statue in the Lancashire village of Roughlee, her home before she was taken to Lancaster Castle to be tried), who speaks up for the condemned and finds herself facing charges. As we learn more about Alice's history, we see how a great past love she experienced has and will cost her dearly. The story of Alice's affair with another woman is erotic and gripping, and the story's supernatural elements are intriguing. Alice is a complex character with a big heart, a woman who embraces her sexuality and stands up against the powerful. This is a suspenseful, disturbing novel about passion, injustice, sacrifice, and bravery in the face of hideous torture and execution. VERDICT Recommended for fans of Winterson, an eclectic British writer whose first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit won the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel. Those with a fascination for this dark era in history will be eager to read. [See Prepub Alert, 4/15/13.]-Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Witchcraft in 17th-century England: from the prolific British author (The Stone Gods, 2008, etc.), a nightmarish novella that burns like a hot coal. It was a notorious trial. The Lancashire Witches were tried and executed in 1612. England was jittery. The Protestant king, James I, was intent on hunting down witches and Catholics. The Gunpowder Plot had been a close call; all the Catholic plotters had fled north to Lancashire. Winterson uses the historical framework, grafting her inventions onto it. Entering the past with her is like walking through an open door. You are there. It is a world of rape and pillage. The most conspicuous witches are the Demdikes, a fearsome family of wretched indigents. The gentlewoman Alice Nutter, wealthy from inventing a dye, lets them live in a grim tower on her land. It is Good Friday. The Demdikes are planning a Black Mass. It is Alice's misfortune to be at the tower when the magistrate arrives. All of them, save Alice, are placed under guard. Alice does not believe in witchcraft, but she does believe in magic, which flickers throughout the narrative. Thirty years before, in London, she had known the alchemist John Dee and the beautiful Elizabeth Southern, one of her two great loves. Then Elizabeth sold her soul to the Dark Gentleman, but Alice stayed young, thanks to Dee's Elixir of Life. Now she is in danger, for her other great love, the Catholic plotter Southworth, has materialized at her house. The magistrate offers a deal: Give up Southworth and go free, or be tried as a witch with the others. Alice refuses, sealing her fate. As the tension mounts, Winterson weaves into her story a voodoo doll stuck with pins and an eerie meeting on haunted Pendle Hill between Alice and the dead John Dee. There will be torture and false testimony. An electrifying entertainment.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.