Do you believe in ghosts?” In introducing her new collection of ghost stories, Jeanette Winterson begins with what might seem the obvious question. Is it, though? In fiction, the suspension of disbelief is usually a tacit arrangement. The writer gets on with the business of invention, leaving the reader to deliberate in private on matters of plausibility. In ghost stories, as in other speculative genres, this implicit contract seems all the more vital. For one thing, our beliefs are neither here nor there. We can enjoy a space opera without accepting that faster-than-light travel is possible (though no one seems to have told the users of Reddit). And in the finest ghost stories – like, say, The Turn of the Screw – the central question is left both unstated and forever unresolved.
I bring all this up because Winterson herself brings it up, and does so repeatedly. Concluding her introduction on a coyly agnostic note, she quotes Samuel Johnson: “All reason is against it, but all belief is for it.” She returns, once the stories are under way, as if to supervise our studies. In a sequence of editorial interventions, she relates uncanny anecdotes of her own. She asserts her ambivalence (“I don’t know – and that’s the best answer I can give”) only to quickly renounce it (“Many of us have experienced telepathy”). She makes intriguing connections between mind-body dualism and AI technology, then veers without warning into fringy prognostication. “Computing technology,” she declares, will not only “realign our relationship with death” but enable us to “defeat” it. These are strong claims, though in fiction – presented as imagined possibilities – such propositions would not trouble us in the slightest. So, when Winterson goes on to do just that, in the sequence of stories labelled “Devices”, her edgy predictions inevitably become hostages to her own persuasiveness of vision. They don’t fare all that well.
In the story App-arition (ouch), the widowed Bella is “haunted” by a smartphone app equipped with her late husband’s voice and abusive nature. In Ghost in the Machine, an unhappy couple scrimp and save to buy idealised avatars, and a home in a swanky virtual resort. When the corporeal Frankie chokes to death on an Oreo, his buff and smarmy digital persona persists. And so on. These are the flimsiest stories here, with the strained hyper-topicality of Black Mirror episodes. And it isn’t just the gauche coinages (“JohnApp”, “e-plots”, “MetaFrocks”). Winterson’s evocation of future virtual realms is hampered by a boomerish grasp of existing technologies. “AI operating systems” aren’t a thing (Google Assistant typically runs on Android or Linux), and lines of software code aren’t usually binary (although compiled machine code is). This is nitpicking, yes, but that’s what happens when artistic licence is repeatedly surrendered and reinvoked.
Winterson finds safer ground when she decamps to more traditional settings. She has always been a fabulist at heart, most at home when weaving virtuosic dreamscapes about transitory selves, and what could be more hallucinatory than a haunting? What identities are less stable than those of ghosts? Under the headings of “People”, “Places” and “Visitations”, we get ghost stories in pretty much the classic mode. As a bride and her intended are haunted by doomed lovers under the battlements of a Scottish castle, Winterson displays her knack for cleverly refashioned archetypes. In a linked pair of stories (A Fur Coat and Boots), an earl gives refuge to a juggler and a thief. The two are lovers, but their intimacy dissolves as each experiences disparate revelations concerning a dark family secret. Winterson takes this Chaucerian setup, jams it with gothic trappings and summons from the whole something blood-soaked, incantatory and mythic.
In such moments, we glimpse Winterson the artist at her most potent, melding the viscerally real with the lavishly supernatural. Repeatedly, though, we are jolted from these experiences by her in-person expostulations. Seizing upon the electromagnetic spectrum, she seeks to convince us that “our mistake is to rename visible light – what we can see – as reality”. This seems tendentious, for a start. Does anyone truly doubt the reality of wifi or microwave ovens? And even if we concede the point, what’s the implication here? That ghosts might subsist as EM radiation? Sure, they might. But then they’d have a physical existence (though Winterson asserts elsewhere that they don’t). They’d be real, in other words. There’d be no disbelief for us to suspend, and we’d confront a mystery of an entirely different kind.
And what, ultimately, is the point of making such arguments in parallel with works of fiction? They’re unfalsifiable at best, and in some clear instances – like the contention that digital data “occupies no physical space” – either flatly mistaken or abstracted beyond discernible meaning. But the real problem with Winterson’s para-futurist manifesto is that its aims are incompatible with those of the art it subjugates. Storytelling is not an empirical discipline, and its creatures are blissfully free of ontological constraints. Stories can make anything believable, even ghosts, but they should never have anything to prove.
• Paraic O’Donnell’s The House on Vesper Sands is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Night Side of the River by Jeanette Winterson is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
