posted on 10 Jan 2024

Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson

I have a vivid memory of buying this novel from Waterstones in Birmingham when it was first released in 1989 but, if truth be told, not because I was so swept away in admiration of the book that it’s imprinted on my mind but because it marked the moment when I decided I would, in future, try and only buy fiction in its first edition hardback state. Part of what prompted that decision was the really rather lovely production values of Winterson’s novel - a superb jacket, 160 pages of rich, creamy paper and a blue silk marker ribbon. All these years on, the book still holds its own against those being published today when the production values are even higher and we are undoubtedly in a golden period of book design.

As for the contents of the book - well, my feelings were much more ambiguous. I remember the pleasurable anticipation as I sat down to read it back in 1989 and the slowly growing feeling that I didn’t really understand what the hell was going on here. Whilst I was just about kept going by some daring and inventive prose, I can’t, hand on heart, say that I came away from it with any clear idea of what it was I’d just read. Slightly sheepishly I returned the book to my shelves and there its stayed ever since - safe from period culls of ‘surplus to requirement’ overspills largely because the book remains a beautiful aesthetic experience to have and hold.

However, over the recent Christmas period as I went through one of those periodic desperate searches for something to read that would be different to the diet of crime and ghost stories I seemed to have adopted, I pulled down Sexing the Cherry and thought to myself that it was well past time for me to try this again - after all, a good 30+ years had flown away and if I was ever going to get something from the book other than a sensual thrill, this had to be the moment.

Well, I have to report that I remain a little mystified but impressed in equal measure by the inventive daring and the extraordinary quixotic nature of the endeavour. What is this book? Well, in part a historical fantasy with more than a hint of Rabalais about it; some part feminist tract; a meditation on the nature and fluidity of time; a critique of late 20th century mores. It’s all just about held together by the central character, known to all as The Dog Woman, who is part monstrous mythological being and part perverse Earth Mother who bestrides the book. Her adopted son, found in the mud of the Thames, moves through time to eventually manifest in the 20th century. Michael Gorra, reviewing the book for the New York Times in 1990, concisely captures the core of the book:

‘''Sexing the Cherry'' fuses history, fairy tale and metafiction into a fruit that's rather crisp, not terribly sweet, but of a memorably startling flavor. Set mostly in the 17th century, the novel employs two alternating narrators. One is the gigantic Dog Woman, an appealingly innocent murderess, puzzled by just what it is that attracts people about sex - for she's so enormous that experiencing it herself has proved impossible. The other is her adopted son, Jordan, a naturalist who wonders about the human applications of ''the new fashion of grafting, which we had understood from France,'' the grafting through which a new kind of cherry tree has been created and given a sex - female - without parent or seed. And the novel itself grafts together not just those two voices, but different narrative modes as well.’

But I don’t think this is a book you read for plot - while there are narrative consistencies, storytelling in the linear sense of it clearly isn’t Winterson’s concern. This is more like a downhill sledge ride powered by some sparkling writing that delights and astounds by turns. Give this book to a hundred readers and you’ll get an equal amount of different interpretations of what the key messages are. Take your pick, you are the reader.

The book is available in paperback editions but I’d appeal to you to invest in the hardback - it is, when all is said and done, just a lovely thing to own and handle.

 

Terry Potter

January 2024