The reasons for this are two-fold. First it is a witty, intelligent, engaging novel. The premise of the book illustrates the point. The story explores what happens to a love triangle in post-Euclidean geometry. Euclidean theorems depend on space being flat. Then the points of a triangle can be kept distinct and separate.
However, Einstein realised that space is curved and in curved space “the angles over-add themselves and parallel lines always meet”. The points of the triangle converge and are submerged within each other so that identities are mixed.
What Winterson does so well is turn physics into fiction by making a love story out of modern science (or rather modern scientists who are destined to meet).
Her stylish prose illustrates how in post-Einstein physics we are all interconnected.
The claim to a separate identity is but a construct. Furthermore, what appears to be a coincidental relationship is but a failure to analyse properly the fluidity of what we call reality. This means of course, as Winterson acknowledges and explores, the identity of writer and reader are equally converged and confused.
You can’t help wondering, however, how come in a book in which the author thinks she is “dead” Winterson manages to speak so eloquently from beyond the grave. And in case you are beginning to think the book is all physics and no fun, let me assure you that the science in no way obstructs the narrative, which grips throughout, nor detracts from the characters whose personalities are explored in a way which takes our own histories seriously. Nor is the humour lost amid the theorems.
All the above would be enough to earn a place in my comfort corner but there is more. The dénouement of the book is an act of cannibalism when one of the main characters tucks into one of the others. It is a sort of inverse eucharistic moment: this is your body taken by me. It is a selfish act of consumption by a character whose significant failing is emotional immaturity. The character has a track record of consuming people, though until this point not quite so literally.
The cannibalistic act contrasts with the thoughts of another of the main characters who learns emotional maturity by confronting, on behalf of a lover, the emotions (she refers to them as the Seven Dwarfs: Anger, Pain, Fearful, Nervy, Callous, Nightmare, and Ruthless - with Nervy and Fearful in the lead) which well up within her. This character seeks to consume her own negative history, not someone else’s body, and, we believe, begins to redeem herself.
The cannibalism reminds us that we are constructed of things which eat away at us and need to be confronted. The people within us, whose histories have converged with our own, be “we” church, society or individual and be “they” parent, minister or lover, can lead us to seek to destroy others and thereby ourselves.
This tends to suggest the novel has a moralising tone, which it does not. Rather it is a multi-layered book which invites us to engage with it according to our own priorities and concerns. So when I next read it I expect it will remind me that I need to face the emotions which are welling up within, wanting to consume me.