Sexing the Cherry

Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This magical tale defies easy description. From the first, Winterson destabilises time and place so that all we know is what we see --

My name is Jordan. This is the first thing I saw.

We follow Jordan the foundling from the smelly banks of the Thames where he lives with his mother, the Dog-Woman, out to sea, around the world and back again. Our hero is the first to deliver a pineapple to the shores of Great Britain. This is the 1640s -- an age of political unrest, seafaring discoveries, plagues and superstitions.

But we are not solidly grounded in one time or place. We float off into the realm of the fantastic, as if gravity just doesn't apply in Winterson's writing. There is a household of tightrope dancers who never let their feet touch the floor and who eat their dinner in midair, suspended on chairs hanging around a table, with a pit of hungry alligators below (into which the leftovers are scraped).

We visit a town that is loosed, in its entirety, from its earthly ties and floats away, anchoring from time to time like a sky-borne ship to hamlets far below. There is a town where everyone dies in a plague of love.

Our heroines, the Twelve Dancing Princesses, come and go from these magical places and speak matter-of-factly about their exceptional lives. The first princess, we learn, lives in a well with her lover, a mermaid. Another princess was blinded and beaten when she and her lover, Rapunzel, were tricked by the prince who threw them out of their tower.

We experience this queering of history as well as of fairy tales as a violent, mythic and invisible history that seems to run parallel to our recorded, received history.

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. (9-10)

I was out of my depth with the historical references to the Civil War period -- Puritans, Royalists, parliament, the beheading of a king, Oliver Cromwell, God's Elect, John Tradescant, etc., etc. Luckily, I don't think Winterson is going for historical fiction here, not in the traditional sense. Most of the historical scenes have a distinctly alternative flavour (Winterson's speciality?).

The brothels are full of Puritan preachers. Dog-Woman, encouraged by a Royalist gang, works to avenge the King's death by collecting eyeballs from the living.

And we become sufficiently untethered in time to make it up to the present day, where characters very much like Jordan and Dog-Woman encounter the shadows of their former selves.

The river runs from one country to another without stopping. And even the most solid of things and the most real, the best-loved and the well-known, are only hand shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light. (144)

This is a wonderous, mysterious book that I will need to read a few more times to make any more sense of. Despite not understanding all of it, I was entranced by Winterson's language and playful philosophising.

There were those who believed that only passion freed the soul from its mud-hut, and that only by loosing the heart like a coursing hare and following it until sundown could a man or woman sleep quietly at night. (38)

On love, creative endeavor, myth and the uniqueness of our own experience of the world -- Winterson's thoughts are worth listening to.

I read this for the GLBT Reading Challenge.