Jeannette Winterson: Sexing the Cherry

Well this was weirdly and bizarrely fascinating book. Really difficult to categorise ( so first plus point). The word story is the best basic word but so many others could be used...fantasy, fairy tale, meta-novel, historical fantasy, feminist fable, raucous comedy, black comedy, poignant drama...take your pick.

Time is a very major theme but it is dealt with interestingly as the fabric of the novel changes as one goes through it and we jump time and space...so one needs to keep ones reading wits around one.

The style of the book is wonderful...the dialogue of the characters is wonderfully distinctive for each and the prose style could best be described as poetic as there are many astonishingly vivid, beautiful and from images embedded in the text and they shine and twinkle superbly. Angela Carter is the name that most obviously springs to mind in this respect particularly with Winterson's take/version of fairy tales and fairy tale figures of whom there are many in this book...not least the main character Dog Woman.

Anyway always great to discover a new author and I will certainly try some more of her work. I see she has done one of a series of modern novel versions of Shakespeare plays ( Bloomsbury I think are the publishers) so that will be worth looking out..as will others in that fascinating-sounding series.