Review of Jeanette Winterson's "The Passion"

Several years ago, I read Jeanette Winterson's “Written On The Body,” which made a tremendous impression on me, and unfortunately I haven't found my way to another Winterson novel until now. What struck me most about her writing then and still what attracts me the most is her command of an innovative, unique style that reminds me of a melange of the best of Robertson Davies, Angela Carter, and Borges. It has a fantastical quality all its own that seems quite separate from magical realism, and in my opinion is much more engaging.

The novel comes in a tiny package, but there's plenty to think about. One of the leitmotifs is the idea of passion in all its forms – war, human love, gambling, the epicurean passions of the sybarite. The character of Villanelle, the daughter of a Venetian boatman who at night masquerades as a man in the Felliniesque casinos of her city, allows the novel just as openly to play with themes of identity and gender – a continuing them in Winterson's fiction.

Henri is a professional soldier in Napoleon's army, fatefully chosen to be the tender of the Emperor's larders as he makes the monomaniacal decision to invade Russia – in the winter, which the characters call “a zero winter.” Villanelle is a fascinating character: married to a vile man, she ends up getting sold into Napoleon's army as a prostitute for community use. Villanelle and Henry meet as Napoleon's army is finally collapsing under its own weight, and Henri has made the decision to desert, along with Patrick, an eccentric priest with a history all his own. During their journey back to Italy, Henri and Villanelle fall in love.

After they finally make it back home, he rescues her beating heart from a Venetian palace, places it back into her body, goes stark raving mad (like Emperor, like soldier), and is committed to a prison where he is forced to see his beloved row by in her gondola every single day. Just like the end of every other love story you've ever read, right?

Villanelle is also a body of paradoxes – a whore and a savior, a man and a woman, a warrior and a lover. Winterson uses religious imagery to highlight her, and successfully manages to make her dialogue with the character of Henri almost kerygmatic. (The passion of the gospels is possibly still another that Winterson is trying to unearth as the story develops.)

While I may very well go back to my old ways and not read her again for another several years, Jeanette Winterson's fiction deserves some serious attention. You can always expect her to be concerned with the mercurial nature of human love (and especially lesbian love), but beyond that, you will never know the set of tropes she will use to explore it – fantastic historical fiction here, physics in “Gut Symmetries,” a post-apocalyptic hellscape in “The Stone Gods,” or memoir in “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” But I hope I’ve learned my lesson and don’t neglect her again for nearly as long.