For the length of the mission, everyone had to eat gammon with pineapple, pineapple upside-down cake, chicken in pineapple sauce, pineapple chunks, pineapple slice. “After all,” said my mother philosophically, “oranges are not the only fruit.”
In Jeanette Winterson's recent memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, she writes that the only time she returned to her childhood home to visit her mother after having been asked to leave many years earlier, she brought along her Black, yet British, girlfriend. Through some sort of misunderstanding, Mrs Winterson thought that all “Africans” love pineapple, and every meal she served during that visit featured the fruit in some form. In Winterson's first novel, Oranges are not the only fruit, this event was fictionalised with a visiting Black, yet British, pastor, and it serves as this book's metaphorical apex: After countless scenes throughout the book of eating only oranges – as if they were, indeed, the only fruit – the fact that her mother eventually acknowledged some diversity in the fruit world might signal that she was growing more accepting of her daughter's nonconforming sexuality as well. Yet, despite tacitly accepting the fact that her daughter had brought along her girlfriend in real life – and doing her best to be a gracious, if woefully misinformed, hostess – the memoir led me to believe that there was never any kind of reconciliation between mother and daughter; this visit was a one off. How interesting it was for me to have read these two books in tandem, and as it must be obvious that I couldn't read the novel separate from the knowledge I had already gained from the memoir, I'm finding it hard to evaluate this book on its own. I suppose my advice for another reader would be: Read Oranges first, and then go to the memoir to find out which bits are supposed to be true. For me, I enjoyed the memoir more despite kind of understanding what Winterson was going for here.
There are different sorts of treachery, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. She burnt a lot more than the letters that night in the backyard. I don't think she knew. In her head she was still queen, but not my queen any more, not the White Queen any more. Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.The basic facts for the protagonist of each book are the same: Jeanette (in my edition her name is Jeanette, though I understand the original release changed her name to “Jess”) was adopted into a strict Pentecostal family, with a domineering and proselytising mother, and a nearly nonexistent father. Jeanette herself is a true believer until she falls in love with another girl and suffers an abusive exorcism to expel her “demon”. She is able to hide her “unnatural passions” for a while, but eventually, the truth comes out and Jeanette is driven from her home. Oranges is divided into eight chapters named after the first books of the Old Testament, and I suppose if I knew those books as well as Jeanette does, I would better recognise their intertexuality (I did get the reference to blowing a trumpet to bring down walls in the above quote from the “Joshua” chapter, but I had to read elsewhere that the final chapter, “Ruth”, is named after the book of the Bible with a covert lesbian narrative). In addition to all the Biblical imagery, Oranges has some flights of fancy from its narrator, which grow in sophistication as Jeanette herself matures. In the beginning, she mentally rewrites Bible stories and fairytales, but eventually, Jeanette reimagines the Grail myths with herself as Perceval:
On the banks of the Euphrates find a secret garden cunningly walled. There is an entrance, but the entrance is guarded. There is no way in for you. Inside you will find every plant that grows growing circular-wise like a target. Close to the heart is a sundial and at the heart an orange tree. This fruit has tripped up athletes while others have healed their wounds. All true quests end in this garden, where the split fruit pours forth blood and the halved fruit is a full bowl for travelers and pilgrims. To eat of the fruits means to leave the garden because the fruit speaks of other things, other longings. So at dusk you leave the place you love, not knowing if you can ever return, knowing you can never return by the same way as this. It may be, some other day, that you will open the gate by chance, and find yourself again on the other side of the wall.In her memoir, Winterson describes taking all of her writing – fact and fiction and flights of fancy – and cutting them up and reassembling them into a collage of truthiness to create this book. But despite my appreciation for the growing sophistication of the mythical asides, they didn't add to my enjoyment of the main narrative (and knowing that this book was adapted into an award-winning TV movie kept distracting me as I wondered how these off-narrative or frequent introspective parts were shown). I should have read the novel first. Winterson won awards for this, her first, novel, and it's hard for me, today, to see what juries might have seen in it way back in 1985. Naturally, if it did anything to promote a “love is love” culture, it's worthwhile for mainstreaming its lesbian main character:
As it is, I can't settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone.That's the same thing everyone wants, and Winterson is a relatable enough voice that she makes a bildungsroman about the coming-of-age of a lesbian writer feel like the coming-of-age of anyone; she had her particular challenges with her Bible-thumping mother, but growing up is a universal challenge to which we can all relate. So to the bottom line: Oranges is certainly well written-written, with some lovely lines and some funny bits too, but I was distracted by the fantasy asides (which didn't necessarily work for me), and the narrative doesn't really resolve in the end. I'd give it three and a half stars if I could, but to rank this against the memoir that I enjoyed more, I'm going to round down to three.
