What is remarkable about the narrator's love for Louise is that it celebrates not her particularity but what she has in common with everybody else. Most people in love are convinced, temporarily at least, of the uniqueness of their love-object. Having established herself in this suitably desolate setting, she is ready to embark on the novel's ambitious central section, a 'love-poem to Louise'. No one wanted to live in it and no one else would have been stupid enough to rent it. Fleeing into self-imposed exile in Yorkshire, the narrator chooses the life of an ascetic, boasting of its privations as though grief cannot properly be experienced in a suburban semi: 'The cottage had been long abandoned. Its motivating force is not love but obsession, and the characterisation of Louise is so slender that she becomes a hook on which to hang the narrator's narcissistic self-examination. This is another example of the way in which the novel undercuts itself, exposing feelings quite different from those it ostensibly describes. The concealed gender of the narrator is a tiresome conceit from a character whose contemptuous misandry hardly admits the possibility that she is anything but female it will be interesting to see whether Winterson's translators, faced with intractably gendered Latin languages, adopt the ponderous circumlocutions necessary to maintain the pretence. This degree of self-assurance is typical of Written on the Body, and a worrying feature of a novel which constantly seems to be doing something other than it claims. It may be that Winterson is edging towards a different truth - that it is easier to write about love when an affair is finished - but her opening leaves no room for dissension. Jeanette Winterson sets out the theme of her new novel in its first sentence why is the measure of love loss? This poses a problem for any reader who disagrees with her premise, the Romantic notion that we truly value something only when we no longer possess it.
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