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| This month features Winterson's Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit |
Oranges, as Jeanette Winterson says in her 1991 introduction, is:
'A comforting novel. Its heroine is someone on the outside of life. She's poor, she's working class but she has to deal with the big questions that cut across class, culture and colour... Superficially, it seems specific: an evangelical household and a young girl whose world is overturned because she falls in love with another young girl. In fact, Oranges deals absolutely with emotions and confrontations that none of us can avoid.'
When I was about eleven I used to fancy Clare Grogan, lead singer of 80s pop band Altered Images; I had two scrapbooks full of cuttings of her. Years passed; the scrapbooks went from shelf to desk drawer to cupboard to attic.
And then, one terrible day - I think the day she first appeared on Eastenders - I realised that Clare Grogan looked just like Margaret Thatcher. And I also realised, slightly after this, when I analysed the feelings of shock and self-loathing, that I might very well have fancied her in the first place because I sensed, in years to come, she would begin to look like Margaret Thatcher.
This, I think, is how a lot of Jeanette Winterson's original admirers must feel. They can defend themselves with the argument that Winterson started well and went rapidly off. After Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Boating for Beginners - they can say - was an immediate lapse into the feminist obvious. (I saw Jeanette Winterson reading from her next novel, The Passion, at Blackwells in Oxford, and she herself was already expressing shame over Boating...; although it appears on her 'Also By' page, it remains absent from her Author Biog.) The Passion - her original fans can argue - was a brief recovery, but then came Sexing the Cherry, which, along with all that followed, was decadence pure and simple.
But the Winterson of Gut Symmetries and The Powerbook is already speaking quite distinctly in Oranges ...
'I could have been a priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are always on the surface. Words for every occasion. The words work. They do what they're supposed to do; comfort and discipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning.'
It is a soapboxy prose very concerned with its own sound, less with sense. At its worse, it tends towards a vowelly echolalia, a consonantal St Vitus's Dance; it reminds me of T. S. Eliot's worst lines: 'No place of grace for those who avoid the face/ No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice.'
Winterson's original admirers can say that, in Oranges..., and fitfully in her later books, she speaks in a completely different voice to this - demotic, expansive, playful. She - they can say - writes wonderful rapid scenes:
'The next problem was who should write the script for the Nativity play. It was unanimously decided it ought to be mother, on account of her education. 'Such a one for figures as you never saw,' May said admiringly. My mother blushed and said she couldn't and accepted.'
But personally I think there is very little difference between the supposed two voices: they both proceed by incongruous juxtapositions. Yet while the non sequitur is a gift to the comedian, it is death to the orator. Which is why Winterson, ever since, has been unable either to entertain or persuade.
In other words, if there was a decadence, it was there from the beginning; nothing preceded it. And so, just as Winterson's original admirers should confess to having once loved in her the things they now decry, I must force myself to admit that it wasn't Clare Grogan but Margaret Thatcher I fancied all along.
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