This is by Jeanette Winterson, who is an interesting person, with a curious story (there's an illuminating interview here).

The Passion was published in 1987, two years after her very successful debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (the only other Winterson work I've read).

My audio-version was ably narrated by Daniel Pirrie and Tania Rodrigues, but it was another of those texts that you need to peruse again after listening.

Reason for reading? Venice... We've not had a Venice book for a while, and I still have a long list to get through...


One of the multitude of covers

The story, first:

It's the era of Napoleon, as it was in Bosnian Chronicle and Magnificent Rebels.

The narration is shared between two people. First, we meet Henri. A simple boy from the French countryside, he becomes a kitchen hand in Napoleon's army. Second, there's Villanelle. She's a wily young woman, and an inveterate gambler. She lives in Venice, has the webbed feet of her boatman father, and survives on her wits. Disappointed that there's no future for her with the rich Venetian woman she has fallen in love with, she marries a cruel and hateful Frenchman. He ends up selling her to be a sex worker in Napoleon's army, and she eventually runs into Henri, bringing our two narrative strands together.

Appalled by the devastation of Napoleon's Moscow campaign, the two resolve to run away, with another soldier called Patrick. Henri and Villanelle succeed in reaching Venice; Patrick dies on the way. But there's not going to be a happily-ever-after. Villanelle's vicious husband reappears, and Henri is surprised (as are we, frankly) to find he knows him from his army days. In an effort to protect Villanelle from her husband's menaces, Henri kills him. He is declared insane, and imprisoned on the Venetian island of San Servelo (which should actually be spelt San Servolo). Villanelle, having inherited money from her dead husband, tries to buy Henri out. But because she doesn't want to marry him, he won't leave. He chooses to stay, with his writing, the spirits of his dead friends, and the garden that he is creating.

It's affecting. Unrequited love is always sad. Villanelle just can't see a future with Henri, even though she bears his daughter; Henri, meanwhile, can settle for nothing less. As far as he is concerned, incarceration is preferable to freedom without her.


Venice, 2023

But there's much more to this novel than the story, and some of the themes are very powerful.

It's a clarion call, for example, to recognize the horror and deception of war:

-- "July 20th, 1804. Two thousand men were drowned today." This was during Napoleon's attempt to cross the Channel...
-- Army recruits are "asked to do in a few weeks what vexes the best philosophers for a lifetime; that is, to gather up their passion for life and make sense of it in the face of death".
-- A conversation with a young girl from Henri's village: "'Will you kill people, Henri?' I dropped down beside her. 'Not people, Louise, just the enemy.' 'What is enemy?' 'Someone who's not on your side.'"
-- "There's no such thing as a limited victory. Every victory leaves another resentment, another defeated and humiliated people. Another place to guard and defend and fear."
-- "Death in battle seemed glorious when we were not in battle. But for the men who were bloodied and maimed and made to run through smoke that choked them into enemy lines where bayonets were waiting, death in battle seemed only what it was. Death..."

The depiction of the "zero winter" is masterful: Napoleon's foolhardy attack on Russia, the starvation, the sickness, Moscow ablaze, the retreat, the cold, the cold, the cold...

And the descriptions of Venice are evocative, though a tad formulaic, I suppose... It's a "city of disguises", a "city of mazes", an "enchanted city", an "invented city". I read here that Winterson had not been to Venice at the point when she wrote this, and relied instead on work by James Morris, Italo Calvino, and John Ruskin. I must admit I found that a little shocking...

The book also has interesting things to say about memory, and the way we recall and narrate events. Henri notes: "It was after the disaster at sea that I started to keep a diary. I started so that I wouldn't forget. So that in later life when I was prone to sit by the fire and look back, I'd have something clear and sure to set against my memory tricks. I told Domino; he said, 'The way you see it now is no more real than the way you'll see it then.' I couldn't agree with him... 'I don't care about the facts, Domino, I care about how I feel. How I feel will change, I want to remember that.'"

Several times in the course of the story, we have a version of this pair of sentences: "I'm telling you stories. Trust me." Each time, we're invited to think about the nature of a story, and what it takes for us to trust the narrator, and what that means anyway...



But, above all else, this is a book about passion. Both "passion" and "the Passion".

The first sense of the word -- the general sense -- is visible in multiple examples:

-- Henri's passion for Napoleon: "Why would a people who love the grape and the sun die in the zero winter for one man? Why did I? Because I loved him. He was my passion and when we go to war we feel we are not a lukewarm people any more." The young man attaches himself to Bonaparte like a duckling to a duck. Having had his eyes opened by his commander's recklessness and folly, however, he turns against him. Villanelle says of Henri: "That's why he hates [Napoleon] so much. He disappointed him. Passion does not take disappointment well. What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?"
-- Henri's passion for Villanelle: ""My passion for her, even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love."
-- Villanelle's passion for gambling: "I have always been a gambler... We gamble with the hope of winning, but it's the thought of what we might lose that excites us... You see, I like passion, I like to be among the desperate." Her watchword, repeated more than once, is: "You play, you win. You play, you lose. You play."
-- Villanelle's passion for her Venetian woman, her Queen of Spades: "I knew I was loved and with a passion I had not felt before. Not in another and not in myself." She loses her heart to this woman. (Literally... Henri has to break in, and recover it... And having recovered it, Villanelle is ready to risk it again. She's a gambler, remember.)
-- Napoleon's passion for chicken (true, apparently...)
-- And all the way through we have plenty of other examples: Carnal passion, religious passion, vengeful passion. Passion is not always beautiful, but it's always powerful; it's a traumatic thing to deal with, but it's also revelatory.



But I kept asking myself why the book's title is "the passion", with that telltale definite article, and not just "passion". The phrase "the Passion" inescapably connects us to the story of Christ's final days, with his arrest, trial, torture, and crucifixion: "The Passion is a story about injustice, doubt, fear, pain and, ultimately, degrading death. It tells how God experienced these things in the same way as ordinary human beings."

Most of the reviews I've read don't really deal with this. But the academic literature does. Tamas Benyei, for example, discusses the way the story is a repetition of the Passion, rather than just a story about passion: "The Passion [the book] is everywhere THE passion, but not in the sense that the story of the passion provides a sacred narrative archetype that 'explains' the profane stories of passion in the novel. The logic of the text disperses the passion all over itself, in the same way that almost every character becomes endowed at some point with Christ-like attributes... Instead of a coherent narrative pattern, the passion becomes a figure, a hidden moment, repeated and performed in every passion: it is the absence and the excess that generates stories of love which cannot speak its name, but which speaks beneath every sentence and story of the novel."

Ahhh, interesting. Dig further...

Jorge Lostao Beltran also underlines that crucial "the" in the title, and quotes Susana Onega on the subject: "The definite article ... transforms Winterson’s third novel from 'a parable of passion' into 'a retelling of the passion', that is, into a novel 'about the way in which every trajectory of passion is inevitably a repetition of what our culture knows as the "original" passion'."

I can't access Onega's work, so I'm relying on Beltran's representation. But she points to the way that definite article gives the protagonists' life stories an archetypal quality, with parallels everywhere (once you look for them).

It's not that there is any kind of one-to-one relationship between the Christ story and our characters. Rather, the references are dispersed, as Benyei puts it. They are peppered throughout the text. It's not a reflection of the Christ story. It's more a mosaic, with the different fragments reassembled in different lives, but still conveying some core of meaning from the original.



Perhaps the clearest reference is this one, where Henri and Patrick take communion (before the Russia debacle): "I took the wafer on my tongue and it burned my tongue. The wine tasted of dead men, 2,000 dead men. In the face of the priest I saw dead men accusing me... I gripped the chalice. When the priest gently curled away my fingers I saw the imprint of the silver on each palm. Were these my stigmata then? Would I bleed for every death and living death?" It is as though Henri sees himself as invested with a mediatory role, involving sacrifice and atonement.

But many of the characters, both the good ones and the bad ones, suffer in ways that recall Christ's passion. Which -- if the crucifixion is God's supreme act of solidarity with mankind -- makes sense. The suffering of each of us is a splinter of the great suffering.

Other elements of Christ's life also make tantalizing little appearances. Villanelle, for example, remembers the touch of the Queen of Spades: "Memories of a single touch. How could anything so passing be so pervasive? But Christ said, 'Follow me,' and it was done." And Villanelle, with the webbed feet of her boatman father, walks on water...

Villanelle has a refreshing attitude to religion: "I took to going to service twice a day to bask in the assurance of Our Lord. I've never had a conscience about basking... Basking can't be called holy, but if it achieves the same results will God mind? I don't think so... Church basking is taking what's there and not paying for it. Taking the comfort and joy and ignoring the rest. Christmas but not Easter..."

There are several references to Christmas. The incarnation is what matters. God made flesh. Not just once, but billions of times. Panentheism: God is IN everything.

Villanelle again: "What a wonder, joining yourself to God, pitting your wits against him, knowing that you win and lose simultaneously... His need for you is greater than your need for him because he knows the consequences of not possessing you, whereas you, who know nothing, can throw your cap in the air and live another day. You paddle in the water and he never crosses your mind, but he is busy recording the precise force of the flood around your ankles. Bask in it..."

It's an interesting thought: God, the supreme gambler, risking the great wager of creating human beings... I wonder whether s/he regrets it...



All this I appreciated. I like a story that I have to fight with, that tantalizes me with the feeling that -- even having thought about it lots -- I may not have extracted everything from it that's there.

It's an uncomfortable kind of book, and I'm not a fan of magic realism (mysteriously detached hearts, and preternaturally long-lasting icicles, and prodigious eyesight, for example).

But it's undeniably vibrant. And it stays with you.