My life in books

Sexing the Cherry, Jeanette Winterson

This is one of those books that is very easy to read and enjoy, and very hard to explain. I read it much earlier in the year, and I’ve been reluctant to write about it because I haven’t been sure where to begin or what to say. I’m still not, but I’m going to try to say something, if for no other reason than reading it is an amazing experience.

This is a beautifully written book with characters that step full-fleshed into your mind and images that linger long after you’ve turned the page. Somewhere between a poem, a fairytale, a hallucination, and a dream, it invites the reader to consider what is the essence of storytelling, once the unities of place, time, plot, causality and even identity are transformed in to a dazzling multiplicity of linkages that observe none of the standard rules of narrative.

Winterson begins the book with two epigraphs:

The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist.

Matter, that thing most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light.

The two main voices are Jordan, who we discover first as a young boy living in mid-17th century London, and his foster mother, a Rabelaisian giantess known as the Dog Woman for the hounds she raises and trains for races and dog fights.

It is Jordan’s voice we first encounter, telling us at the outset that:

Every journey conceals another journey within its lines; the path not taken and the forgotten angle. These are journeys I wish to record. Not the ones I made, but the ones I might have made, or perhaps did make in some other place or time.

And journey Jordan does, though there is little that we can take for granted in such a record, where the supposed facts of history are intermingled with legends, literary allusions and fairy tales, and the other worlds we find in dreams. As his journeys take him further from the Dog Woman, she also engages in journeys of experience and perception while seemingly remaining situated in the physical space and time of the England of Charles II and Cromwell. And yet, we eventually must come to terms with the possibility that Jordan, sailor and companion to the King’s Gardener on his quests for exotic fruits to fill the royal gardens, and the Dog Woman, massive and crude and lusting for life, are themselves journeys of the mind.