The Passion is a strange novel. It's less fragmented than Sexing the Cherry, and in places more colourful, although its heroine is somewhat less Rabbelaisian.

The Passion has two main narrators: Domino, a Frenchman working as a cook and servant in Napoleon's army; and Villanelle, a webbed-footed, cross-dressing casino worker descended from mythical Venetian boatmen who can walk across water. The plot, as such, is almost non-existent. The characters wander leisurely through fairytales, romances and history, picking and choosing what they wish to divulge and having as much fun as possible.

This isn't your stereotypical novel. It's literary, but it's also a fantasy. It's historical, to a point, but also a romance. And yet, it's none of these things.

One of the recurring lines in the novel is Villanelle's: 'Trust me, I'm telling you stories.' Of course, this is a joke, because 'telling stories' can also mean 'telling lies'. And that's the whole point of this book. You have to rely on the narrator, even if they are telling you lies.

There's also an interesting metaphor for the queer body in Villanelle's feet: in her culture, only the male boatmen have webbed feet. As a woman, she shouldn't have webbed feet at all, and so the implication is that she is more than woman. Indeed, her frequent cross-dressing suggests she can move freely between the two genders, not finding herself tied to either.

This is a refreshing, easy-to-read, neat and yet powerful novel, which is what Winterson does best. At times the writing is a little *too* tight and polished, so that a sentence has to be read two or three times because it lacks commas and words such as 'that' and 'had', which might buide the reader as to how a sentence should be read. But all in all, this is a fantastic read.