The Daylight Gate, by Jeanette Winterson - review

Jeanette Winterson’s new novella The Daylight Gate is an enthralling story unfussily told
9 August 2012

The Daylight Gate
by Jeanette Winterson
(Hammer, £9.99)

Jeanette Winterson’s new novella is set in 17th-century Lancashire — “witch country”. Four hundred years ago, it was the scene of the most notorious witch trial that was ever held within our shores, that of the Pendle witches. In The Daylight Gate, so-called after a dialect term for dusk, when the supernatural supposedly gains strength, Winterson seamlessly blends history with fiction, exploring the mystical and the grotesque.

King James I, the pamphleteer monarch, is on the throne. He is intent upon destroying the twin treasons of his time: Catholicism and the occult, those who practise high mass and those who practise black mass. Winterson’s main historical source is the account of the clerk of the court, Thomas Potts, and in her tale he serves as a mouthpiece for the regime too, asking: “What is worse ... to practise witchcraft or to practise the old religion? Witchery popery popery witchery. What is the difference?”

Her protagonist is Alice Nutter, a woman from a respectable family whose involvement in the trial puzzles historians. In Winterson’s version — though Nutter is no believer in witchcraft — she has experienced “magick”: the method of “bringing supernatural forces under human control”. Nutter, a female falconer who rides astride “like a man”, grew rich after inventing a magenta dye that transfixed the Queen, and stays youthful thanks to an elixir.

The Daylight Gate is a bleak book about a world where sadism reigns; Winterson’s staccato sentences cover rape, incest and torture. Graves are robbed, a tongue is bitten off, there’s more blood in these 194 pages than you’ll find in many war films. And the horrors keep mounting: teeth fall from the sky, there’s a wormy severed head and a room where rats eat one another. But there is also tenderness buried deep here: it is also a story about the sacrifices people make for those they love, whether it is the Jesuit priest and Gunpowder plotter Christopher Southworth who returns to Lancashire after his sister is arrested, or Nutter herself. There are even a couple of lighter moments, one stemming from a cameo role from William Shakespeare.

Winterson, who grew up in the shadow of the Pendle Hill, describes the area (“the wild part of the untamed”) and the claustrophobic atmosphere beautifully. But her great skill as an author is most evident in the way she navigates past the clichés of the occult genre, while creating a novel of genuine horror.

The Daylight Gate is an enthralling story unfussily told. I read it all in one sitting, only wishing there were more.

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