In
this uncommonly sensual novel, the narrator has neither name nor gender; the
object of the narrator’s frenetic love is a woman, Louise, who is married to a
prominent medical researcher. The marriage is loveless, without empathy, affection,
and sex. Undaunted by Louise’s relationship, the narrator quips knowingly, “Marriage
is the flimsiest weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-up gun to a
python” (78). Louise’s marriage eventually crumbles, and the lovers flee. Their
happiness, though, is disastrously brief. Louise’s husband, Elgin, discloses to
the narrator that, before their affair, Louise was diagnosed with chronic
lymphocytic leukemia. As a globally distinguished cancer expert, Elgin exacts
his revenge on the lovers by promising treatment available only at a clinic
abroad, which would force the couple to split. Fearing that Louise will forgo
treatment to stay (and eventually die) the narrator writes a letter pleading
her to go abroad, then vanishes into the countryside—a decision that haunts the
narrator for the rest of the novel.
In rural isolation, the narrator pores obsessively over anatomy books: “Within
the clinical language, through the dispassionate view of the sucking, sweating,
greedy, defecating self, I found a love-poem to Louise. I would go on knowing
her, more intimately than the skin, hair and voice that I craved. I would have
her plasma, her spleen, her synovial fluid” (111). In a kind of medicalized
elegy, Winterson breaks the novel out into a standalone section divided into
individual segments that juxtapose excerpts from anatomical textbooks with
deeply felt recollections of the beloved’s leukaemic body. In one section, “The
Cells, Tissues, Systems and Cavities of the Body,” the narrator entreats, “Will
you let me crawl inside you, stand guard over you, trap them [white T-cells] as
they come at you?” (115). Winterson’s narrator, far removed from the realities
of Louise’s treatment, apostrophizes her physical features, performing a kind
of poetic embalmment of her lover’s body as she once knew it.
