Night Side Of The River : Jeanette Winterson At Ilkley Literature Festival

Jeanette Winterson’s stories make wholes out of our failure to get to grips with the unknown, and the, mercifully, infrequent shocks that puncture the fabric of our purpose. Building, like her delivery at Sunday’s performance at Ilkley’s Kings Hall, by a process of steady but uncertain dissection - a kind of trial and error of metaphysical and philosophical speculation - Winterson illuminated her own, well-documented personal background without once apportioning blame for the religious extremity that it entailed.

Winterson was the adopted daughter of strict Lancastrian Pentecostalists whose fervid belief in the ‘End Times’ encouraged adherence to scriptural certainty, and not the least of her concerns in this fascinating examination of our relationship with credulity, with faith, and with a species of hope, was to debunk the myth of surety.

Finding a consonance between our belief in ghosts and our acts of faith in non-biological entities such as God, the writer ranged engagingly, and humorously, over the landscape of the mind, its predilections and suggestibility, and its frightening reliance on AI and the Metaverse as the windows on an alternative world, where truth is negotiable and visions are presented as reality.

Only notionally a talk about ghosts – Winterson’s latest collection of stories, Night Side of the River, is a forensic, and adroitly researched perambulation over many terrains, including grief and loss – the writer gave the audience a heartwarming gift of a family anecdote about a relative who, unwittingly guided by a soldier-ghost, survived the Luftwaffe’s destruction of an entire Liverpool street.

Saving the very best for last, Winterson’s rendering of one of her book’s stories was a triumph of pacing and delivery: framed as an apostrophic address, the narrator sustains a ‘dialogue’ with the ghost of the loved object, as he (narrator and addressee are male) negotiates a passage towards acceptance whilst attempting to distil the many pathways of grief into the paradox of unattainable presence. Read beautifully and very movingly by the writer, we were reminded that the Ilkley Literature Festival mandate is both dynamic and transcending.