“I am a woman going mad. I am a woman hallucinating. I imagine I am huge, raw, a giant.”

Jeanette Winterson seems to care very little about rules and conventions in the matters of writing fiction. If there’s one thing she takes seriously, it’s being utterly mad. Mad in the true sense of the word, yes, and also being unpredictable, zany, and moody with what she’s creating. In her own confession, time is circular and novels harbour a strange desire to compress all of it into a few hundred pages. A novelist is a slave to this desire. Her fifth book Sexing the Cherry, published in 1989, is “all about what happens in between what happens.” In the Introduction, Winterson hands you a guide on how to read the novel. Pretty soon you realise it is of no help at all.

In the beginning

In the beginning, the novel hurls you back to London of the 1660s. Dog Woman, a woman of monstrous proportions, finds a male orphaned baby in the “grey waters” on the Thames. As her name suggests, she has thirty dogs to her name who she takes to Hyde Park for runs and to show off, and breeds them for sustenance and fun. The discovery of the baby turns her into something of a mother figure to it. The child grows to love her despite her repugnant physical features – she has two hundred teeth, can fit a dozen oranges in her mouth, she can fling an elephant into the air. Unbound by familial duties or a husband at home, the two set out on adventures of many lifetimes.

The late 1600s were a difficult time in England. The unrest that began since the uncovering of the Gunpowder Plot was yet to be quelled. Civil wars were rife, there was a stink of revolution in the air, and overall a bad time to be a supporter of the King. However, Dog Woman staunchly believes that the King took to the throne under Divine ordinance. It is the will of god. Her loyalty and spunk make her a dependable ally to the King. She disposes of dissenters and revolutionaries in a mad attempt to prevent any harm from befalling her beloved King. History, of course, will show us otherwise.

Meanwhile, Jordan, her son, has the heart of a dreamer. It is a time of great marine exploration and he sets out in search of love and stories, traversing time and space. Violating these sacred boundaries would mean meeting one’s ghosts of the past and future. A risky business for we understand the ghost of the present as our true selves. Dog Woman and Jordan will encounter themselves in many worlds, each madder and stranger than the one before.

As realised quite early on, Winterson has very little interest in playing by the rules. The author defies every expectation as she flutters between fable, history, fairytale, and mythology.

Somewhere in the middle

The section Twelve Dancing Princesses (featuring twelve dancing princesses) indulges in serious gender-bending narratives. The fragmented, feverish accounts make you wonder about the queerness of ordinary lives – the truths we withhold, the semi-truths we divulge. Though Dog Woman’s despise for men is so clear, she finds herself unable to commit to the rituals of womanhood. She too is among the dancing princesses who have broken free of sexual conventions and gender norms.

In addition to the grand carnival-like atmosphere that Winterson manages to create in less than 200 pages, we also get a taste of what the genre “magical realism” might actually mean. In a sense, Sexing the Cherry is an invitation to suspend all your beliefs and give in to the extraordinariness of the ordinary. For example, think about how the cherry was created. It is a fruit not born of a seed, and yet we have sexed it and consider it female. “Let the world mate of its own accord or not all,” the humble cherry reminds us.

The idea that dwells in the heart of Sexing the Cherry is quite radical: it says we are more than our bodies. More than our grotesqueness, corporeality, mortality. We exist in our imaginations and that of others, all our lives we yearn for someone to understand us. The endless capacity to imagine many realities and many worlds is what is perhaps humanity’s most vital strength: “If the other life, the secret life, could be found and brought home, then a person might live in peace and have no need for God.”

Sexing the Cherry, Jeanette Winterson, Penguin Vintage.