‘Enemies were: The Devil (in his many forms), Next Door, Sex (in its many forms), Slugs.
Friends were: God, Our Dog, Auntie Madge, The Novels of Charlotte Brontë, Slug pellets.’
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit tells the story of Jeanette (a fictionalized version of the author Jeanette Winterson) and her fervently religious upbringing. Jeanette’s mother raises Jeanette to believe that the world is full of evil, the end of days is nigh, and that her mission in life is to convert non-believers to the true faith. For many years, Jeanette accepts these teachings. However, when Jeanette is a young woman, she feels conflicted after developing romantic feelings for one of her converts. Her Church teaches that homosexuality is a sin, yet she personally believes it is possible to love both God and a woman. Oranges is a powerful coming-of-age novel about struggling to reconcile faith with sexuality, challenging accepted wisdom, and developing individual beliefs and values.
The novel is divided into eight chapters, each named after the first eight books of the Bible. This is very clever, for it allows parallels to be drawn between Biblical episodes and the events in Jeanette’s life. For example, in The Book of Exodus, Moses delivers the Israelites out of slavery and in the chapter ‘Exodus’ in Winterson’s novel, Jeanette is forced to attend formal schooling for the first time. In the chapter entitled ‘Joshua,’ Jeanette develops ‘Unnatural Passion’ for Melanie and rejects her mother’s teachings (‘It is the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet’) whilst The Book of Joshua details the Battle of Jericho and the walls of Canaan falling to the sound of trumpets. Someone with a fairly basic knowledge of the Bible is likely to get the majority of religious references throughout the book and any confusion is likely to be resolved by a simple google.
I found the first few chapters of Oranges the most accomplished and the most enjoyable to read. These chapters focus on Jeanette’s early life, her relationship with her mother, the Church’s congregation and some of the people in her village. These chapters are notably more humorous than the ones that follow. They are littered with amusing anecdotes, like how Jeanette terrorized the other children at her local primary school with her preaching about eternal damnation, the time she went deaf for three months, unbeknownst to her mother and other churchgoers who assumed she was in a holy rapture, and her failure to win the school’s embroidery contest (the teachers didn’t think an artistic impression of the terrified damned would appeal to the judges, much to Jeanette’s annoyance).
However, from roughly the fourth chapter onwards, it all gets a bit confusing and vague. In comparison to Jeanette and Jeanette’s mother, all the other characters are thinly drawn. We learn very little about them and references to them are abrupt and never really contextualised or elaborated on. The novel is linear in the loosest sense. In many chapters, I had no real idea how old Jeanette was or what was happening in her life. It was hard to believe Jeanette’s relationships with romantic partners because we learn so little about the cast of more minor characters. By the end of the book, you’re still not really sure where Jeanette is at in her life, what her relationships with other characters are like, and so on.
I’m also not sure what to make of the novel’s experimental style. Winterson states in her rather self-congratulatory introduction that ‘the confidence of the writing and the experimentation with form and material’ would have made the book a modern classic from the outset, had she been a straight white male. Perhaps she is right. Indeed, Winterson does experiment with form, for Jeanette’s maturation is intersected by fairytales and Arthurian legends. I appreciated the first fairytale, in which gender roles are subverted. However, the relevance of the other myths and legends went over my head, and I didn’t feel like their inclusion added much to the novel as a whole.
To summarise, I would potentially recommend this book although, given its status as a contemporary classic, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to. I love Winterson’s sense of humour but I just wish the latter half of the book was written as well as the first half. I would rate Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit 3.5 out of 5 stars.
I wanted to end this post with one of my favourite quotations from the book:
‘I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it […] 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 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 you call home? Only the one who knows your name.’
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