But what about the intervening three decades? Good question.
It's not that I've not read anything by Jeanette. I read - and fell in love with - The Passion when I studied it as part of an undergraduate literature course at the University of Sydney. But even that was a bit delayed. The course ran in 2012. The novel was published in 1987. Of course, I read anything Jeanette writes in The Guardian. And I subscribe to her web site's discussion forum. So I'm not entirely beyond the pale.
I even have more recent works sitting on my 'waiting-to-be-read-shelf'. It may have been that fact which drove me back to the beginning (not in the way of T S Eliot's Little Gidding in Four Quartets, although there is a thread uniting the two oddly enough). But having ordered and received through the post from the Book Depository The Daylight Gate (2012) I thought that maybe I should read earlier works first. Given my past performance, mind you, I am likely to start reading my latest Winterson purchase in about 29 years. Will I still be reading in 2043? I may have been dead for some time by then so reading may be beyond a man of even my skill set. But then again, I would be 86; two years older than my mother is now and - shock, horror - she still reads, so it's not entirely beyond the realm of possibility. But that's not what I came here to talk about. I came to talk about Oranges ...
Fabby (which is an often under-used term in literary criticism) Eff - eh - bee - bee - wi.
What do I love? The voice, wit, humour, seriousness, acute sense of place and time and people, an eye for the absurd without any hint of cruelty or condescension, the interplay between different forms and the mixture of genres - autobiography, reportage, memoir, observation, fantasy, fairy tale and romance all wrapped neatly in a piece of self-aware metafiction. I like the tone and the ambition. I love the bravado: if you're going to play post-modern games of intertextuality why not do your intertextualising with The Holy Bible, Le Morte d'Arthur and Jane Eyre?
If the novel - is it a novel? - has a flaw it may be (for me at any rate) the leap and the speed of that leap from the micro-detail of everyday existence, family and community life of the first 5 chapters to the ruminations of the final chapter. But that may just have been greed on my part. I would have enjoyed more of the Bildungsroman before I got to the coda. But I'm nit-picking and besides, what would I know?
You feel you're in the presence of a courageous, inventive and confident writing mind when suddenly you come upon this:
"Whelks are strange and comforting.
They have no notion of community life and they breed very quietly.
But they have a strong sense of personal dignity.
Even lying face down in a tray of vinegar there is something noble about a whelk. Which cannot be said for everybody."
