By Megan Thomas
I won’t lie to you. It’s very, very weird and I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting. But it’s good-weird.
It starts with a young child found in the murky 17th century Thames by a large woman with a lot of dogs. It is a very (intentionally) disjointed conceptualisation of the interchangeability of time, experience and selfhood.
I like Jeanette Winterson’s style of writing, which often reads in a stream-of-consciousness. I did find at times, though, that I’d just press on and hope that what was happening started to become clear rather than reading and rereading for clarity.
I imagine that people who adore the book – and there are plenty of them – have managed to detach their reading experience from the need for structure and I’m not quite there yet. I don’t regret reading it though, and found that the structure, or lack thereof, made room for some pearls of thought that would otherwise be unachievable.
