The Passion

"We are. It’s set in the early 19th century in Europe and then in Venice. I reread it when I was writing The Glassmaker , because I was curious how Jeanette Winterson would handle Venice, and the feeling of Venice. I was really taken with it. It’s about a soldier, Henri, who roasts chickens for Napoleon. That’s his job. He goes around during, before and after the battles, making sure that Napoleon has enough roast chicken. At some point, he meets a prostitute named Villanelle. Villanelle is a gondolier’s daughter from Venice, who has webbed feet. So already we know we’re in magic realism territory, but not too much. It’s like rich pastry, this book. The two of them go across Europe and end up in Venice, and Venice transforms them both. Villanelle has an affair with a noblewoman, but it’s slightly unrequited. Henri loves Villanelle, but she doesn’t quite love him back the way he wants. They start cross-dressing. They murder somebody and have to escape. They’re going through the canals on boats, and it’s incredibly dark and magical. It’s like the way Venice is. You can go there, particularly during Carnival, when everybody wears masks, and become transformed into something other than yourself. I think she captures incredibly well that powerful feeling of Venice being like that. There’s a quote I just have to share. She says, “In this enchanted city, all things seem possible. Time stops, hearts beat, the laws of the real world are suspended.” When I read it, I thought, ‘Oh, that’s exactly what I’m doing with time in my book!’ Apparently, Jeanette Winterson didn’t go to Venice before she wrote the book. I was so impressed that she managed to capture this intangible quality of Venice in words, without having been there. That really surprised me. Yes, very much so. It won a couple of awards. Everybody was reading it. It came out in 1987, when I had just moved to the UK. It felt like everybody was talking about it. It’s funny how it seems to have been set aside. It’s still in print, but I guess Jeanette has gone on to write a lot of other books in different directions. This was one direction which she didn’t subsequently pursue: I don’t think she’s written any other historical novels. There was one before this one, called Sexing the Cherry , which is also historical. Those two together made a package and then she moved on to other things. Do you mean have I murdered somebody and then escaped through the canals?!? I’ve been going to Venice for a long time. I used to go every two years for the Biennale, my husband and son and I. We had our honeymoon there 30 years ago. But a place changes when you write about it, and you start researching it. You’re at a certain level as a tourist and then it goes deeper and deeper, and now I understand more of the history. So, for instance, the wealthy city it was, that center of trade, built all of those beautiful buildings—or a lot of them, anyway. Those buildings are still there, but the wealth isn’t, and that’s what made them crumble. It’s been a tourist attraction for centuries. The carnival became a big thing, and there was a lot of gambling, a lot of prostitution, a lot of licentiousness. It had a reputation for the freedom of the mask and being able to do what you wanted. Until Napoleon came in 1797 and conquered it, and then it went downhill. The Austrians took it over for a while, and it just crumbled. I didn’t know any of that. When I walk around, I understand it better now. Some of it is really practical. There are these places in Venice that have straight, broad passageways. The Austrians wanted to bring their horses in, so they covered over canals to build those. Then there are other parts that are very different and much older and you think, ‘Oh, the Austrians didn’t get to here.’ The other thing is that it was a city that was built around water, so the front doors of these big palazzi were on the canals. I didn’t really see that until I went kayaking through the canals. Somebody took me in their boat through the canals, and I could see the front doors. They’re all blocked up now, but you can see what it was like. They have floods all the time. So the ground floor, the androne , is always marble or stone that can be flooded, and then washes out. Everything else is up top. You never buy an apartment that’s on the ground floor. You always leave it empty. It’s just things like that I didn’t really understand until I spent a lot of time there and actually researched it. Go in November or January, that’s what I always recommend. January is fabulous. It’s cold, but there are no tourists, and everybody’s really nice and friendly. The city becomes itself again."