Tanglewreck: Jeanette Winterson’s Time-Twisting Adventure of Silver and the Timekeeper
Time has gone mad: now it races, now it stops; some days are shorter, others go on forever, and worse, London is struck by terrible time tornadoes that make people vanish without a trace. Only one person seems to know what is going on: Abel Darkwater, a sinister collector who claims that the Timekeeper, an alchemical clock, is the only thing that can control the situation.
Author: Jeanette Winterson (born 1959)
Title: Tanglewreck (2006)
Format: English paperback (Bloomsbury), 415 pages
Scope: Children’s and young-adult fantasy about time
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/1599900815 (ASIN 1599900815)
Silver
Darkwater lost track of the Timekeeper four years ago, when the couple who were going to show it to him disappeared along with it. Now he is convinced that Silver, their orphaned daughter, can help him get it back. After the strange collector’s unexpected visit, the girl senses that something is wrong and runs away.
Underground
That is when she meets Gabriel and his underground friends, strange beings who live beneath the city because they cannot bear the light. But the wicked Regalia also lives down there, and she wants to control time so that she can sell it. Silver realises that she must find the Timekeeper and protect it from two people who want to use it for their own dark purposes. All the clues lead to Tanglewreck, her family’s house, and if she fails, past and future will be joined forever.
Winterson’s First Children’s Novel
Jeanette Winterson made her name with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), a semi-autobiographical novel about a girl raised by a fiercely religious adoptive mother in Lancashire, which won the Whitbread Award for a first novel. Her adult fiction often plays with time, history and identity, and Tanglewreck, published in 2006, was her first full-length novel for children. It brings those preoccupations to a younger audience with real energy and imagination.
Time Out of Joint
The premise turns physics into adventure. In Winterson’s London, time no longer flows evenly: pockets of the past break through into the present, so that a Victorian street or a woolly mammoth might suddenly appear, and people are swept away into other centuries. The house where Silver lives, Tanglewreck, is old, rambling and slowly decaying, a perfect setting for a story about holding on to the past and letting it go.
Real Science in a Fantasy
Winterson weaves in ideas from modern physics: Einstein’s discovery that time passes differently depending on speed and gravity, black holes, wormholes and the strange behaviour of quantum particles. The famous thought experiment of Schrödinger’s cat, in which a cat in a sealed box is, according to quantum theory, both alive and dead until someone looks, appears in the story, and the names of the physicists Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking show that the author took her research seriously.
Who Will Enjoy It
Readers of about ten to fourteen who enjoyed Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time or Philip Pullman’s novels will find a similar mix of adventure and big ideas here. It is long and sometimes demanding, but Silver is a brave and appealing heroine, and the book may well awaken an interest in science.
Physics for Young Readers
The book also has a teaching side: it touches on physics, and the novel even brings in eminent scientists such as Penrose and Hawking, and the cat from Schrödinger’s famous experiment. Winterson uses the story to illustrate ideas such as black holes and the possibility of time travel faster than light, and she even invents a few rules of her own. It is an original, poetic adventure for curious readers of about ten and up.
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