Great Moments in Aviation & Oranges are Not the Only Fruit: Two Filmscripts

Gabriel Angel is on board a ship and heading for England. This young black woman has a small amount of luggage, but a large amount of courage: "You've got to risk the best you've got if you want a little bit of life." Gabriel has left her home in the Caribbean for the opportunity to spread her wings, but for the moment she is enclosed on a ship out in the middle of the ocean. In this film script Winterson characters are limited by location, but their emotional lives are given free reign. Winterson concentrates on five passengers, Gabriel, who's grand-father was a "magician, and a entertainer, a man of the air"; Duncan Stewart, a handsome, mysterious photographer; Rex Goodyear, an art dealer in his 50s, and two missionary women, Doctor Bead and Miss Quim. Each person has a secret, a hidden past or motivation, which gradually begins to effect all of the others as the seven-day voyage continues. The ship becomes a floating vessel of stories, a love story, a mystery story, a drama of revenge and redemption. Familiar Winterson themes are explored here: the transformation of the ordinary work-a-day world into something vibrant and magical; the quest for beauty and truth, the workings of the heart. But what is sometimes missing is the sheer joy of language. Winterson's novels are as much about the glory of words, as the interest of a story, here the prose is more pared down, stripped away. The mind's eye has to work as a camera, filling in light and texture and image and this makes for a challenging read. Eithne Farry