While many other novels
are still nursing hangovers from the 20th century, The
PowerBook has risen early to greet the challenge of the new
millennium. Set in cyberspace, Jeanette Winterson's seventh novel
(or eighth, if you count her disowned Boating for Beginners)
travels with ease, casting the net of its love story over Paris,
Capri, and London. Its interactive narrator, Ali, is a
"language costumier" who will swathe your imagination in
the clothes of transformation: all you have to do is decide whom
you want to be. Ali--known also as Alix--is a virtual narrator in
a networked world of e-writing. You are the reader, invited to
inhabit the story--any story--you wish to be told. As in all the
best video games, you can choose your location, your character,
even the clothes you want to wear. Beware: you can enter and play,
but you cannot determine the outcome.
Ali/x is a digital Orlando for the modern age,
moving across time and through transmutations of identity, weaving
her stories with "long lines of laptop DNA" and shaping
herself to the reader's desire. She wants to make love as simple
as a song, but even in cyberspace there is no love without pain.
Ali/x offers a stranger on the other side of the screen the
opportunity of freedom for one night. She falls in love with her
beautiful stranger, and finds herself reinvented by her own story.
The PowerBook is rich with historical
allegory and literary allusion. Winterson's dialogue crackles with
humor, snappy dialogue, and good jokes, several of which are at
her own expense. This is a world of disguise, boundary crossing,
and emotional diversions that change the navigation of the plot of
life. Strangely sprouting tulips are erected in place of the
phallus. Husbands and wives are uncoupled. Lovers disappear in the
night to escape from themselves. On the hard drive of The
PowerBook are stored a variety of stories that the reader can
download and open at will, complete stories that loop through the
central narrative. The tale of Mallory's third expedition, the
disinterring of the Roman Governor of London in Spitalfields
Church, or the contemplation of "great and ruinous
lovers" are capsules of narrative compression. In Winterson's
compacted meaning, language becomes a character in its own
right--it is one of the heroes of the novel.
"What I am seeking to do in my work is to
make a form that answers to 21st-century needs," Winterson
has written. The PowerBook does just that. Her prose has
found a metaphor for its linguistic forms of creation that feels
almost invented for her, "a web of coordinates that will
change the world." There will be a virtual rush of
Internet-themed books in the networked naughties. With The
PowerBook Winterson has triumphantly gotten there first. --Rachel
Holmes
Oranges
Are Not the Only Fruit
The
Powerbook 
