The Daylight Gate, which uses the basic circumstances of a 1612 witch trial in Lancashire as its starting point (“but with necessary speculations and inventions,” as Winterson puts it in the introduction) is much more bleak and gruesome than I tend to like my fiction. There are rapes; there is torture; there is a severed head dug up from a grave, and a tongue bitten out of someone’s mouth. Though there are some supernatural moments, the horror in this book is pretty solidly of the human variety: the poor and powerless “intoxicating themselves with the thought of power,” and those in power using it to persecute others (35). What beauty and hope exists is mostly of the human variety, too: love, and choice, and connection, and loyalty. “I think we are worlds compressed into human form,” the protagonist says at one point (72). Another character thinks about how “at every moment the chances change”—how life is a series of “ifs” that could have gone differently, that could go differently until they don’t (168). There are questions of fate and choice, images of people as being trapped in a set of circumstances, or not, and I think those were the bits of this book I liked best.
Meanwhile, because it is too pleasing not to share, here is a description of London from this book: oh man I love list-paragraphs like this:
Stables, kennels, breweries, carpenters’ shops, pudding dens, low-roofed sheds where they sewed jerkins or rolled candles. Inns, taverns, bakers, cook shops, men and women smoking clay pipes carrying fish baskets on their heads. Dogs running in and out of the cartwheels, a parrot on a perch, a women selling bolts of cloth from a cart. A tinker with pots and pans hung round his thin body. A fiddler playing a melody. A sheep on a rope, the smell of mutton flesh cooking, the smell of iron being heated till it glowed. A little boy with bare feet, a girl carrying a baby, two soldiers, ragged and thin. (177-178)
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