[In the following positive review, Waugh evaluates the strengths of The PowerBook.]

The sparkling originality of Jeanette Winterson's new novel, The.PowerBook, is all the more enjoyable for being, despite its extraordinary flights of fantasy and a rich mixture of literary and historical references, entirely unpretentious. This writer may sometimes have been accused of showing off, but if she is doing so here, it is with such wit and subtlety and so much for the reader's pleasure that it is a joy. This reviewer for one was as delighted by Winterson's recipe for tomato sauce as by her list of great and ruinous lovers which rates Burton and Taylor, Oscar and Bosie alongside the likes of Tristan and Isolde and Paolo and Francesca.

The novel takes place—if it can truly be said to take place at all—in Cyberspace where fantasy evolves through the Net, in Paris, Capri and London. It is, like all good novels, about love, passion, possession, time, death, pleasure, the human condition, the search for reality and history. You name it, it's there, yet because of the nature of the book's construction and because of the remarkable darting about in time and space, it all seems like fairyland where nothing is quite as it appears and nothing is tangible.

It tells the story of how, through the Net, our narrator, a young woman writer sometimes called Ali, sometimes Alix, meets and falls in love with a beautiful married woman. Will she, won't she, leave her husband? The only selfish life is a timid one, we are told, and our narrator is certainly no timid creature. She sells dreams through the Net or disguises from a fancydress shop in Spitalfields for those who wish for freedom for one night—the freedom to be someone else. But is such an escape attainable, or does the escaper merely find that a new net is closing around her? How possible is it to become an exile from one's own past?

A marvellous combination of history and myth is interwoven into the story of Ali and her friend, from which tales Winterson raises questions, philosophises, producing on occasion a little homespun wisdom along the lines of ‘in this life you have to be your own hero.’

Here we have the story of Mallory's final attempt to climb Everest, the awful tale of Francesca da Rimini and her lover, Paolo, whom Dante punished so cruelly for their ill-fated love, we have references to Rembrandt, to Tiberius, to Muck House, our narrator's deprived childhood home whence she began her search for treasure—love, truth. The whole short book seems to gallop apace on the winged chariot of Winterson's fantasy, carrying the reader with it by its humour, its lightness of touch and most especially by the clarity and the brilliance of the evocative writing.

Winterson never seems to put a foot wrong. You can sometimes feel her sailing dangerously near the wind as she scurries along, tacking between 16th-century Turkey, the mythical world of Lancelot and Guinevere and present-day Italy, talking of love and power and the Net, but she miraculously manages never to fall into sentimentality, banality or tendentiousness of any kind. She, like her narrator, is always on the run. It is worth reading the book for her description of Capri alone.

But it has to be said that, in essence, this is a book about love and a love story—a very moving one at that—which by virtue of the way it is told contrives to have a universal application. It is funny, clever, entertaining and wholly delightful.