Novel: The Passion

Overview
Jeanette Winterson's The Passion is a lyrical, uncanny novel set against the turbulence of Napoleonic Europe and the glittering, decaying city of Venice. The narrative follows two central figures whose lives intersect in unpredictable and often violent ways: Henri, a young French soldier shaped by the logic and magnetism of Napoleon's campaigns, and Villanelle, a Venetian woman of relentless appetites whose sensuality and cunning make her as enigmatic as the lagoon city itself. The novel moves between battlefield rigor and carnival excess, history and fairy tale, treating grand political events as catalysts for intimate, often erotic transformations.
Rather than a conventional chronological narrative, the book is a collage of voices and episodes that braid together obsession, hunger, and the search for meaning. Episodes of vivid realism, marches, sieges, carnival nights, are shot through with episodes that feel mythic or surreal, so that love and war, appetite and ideology become mirrored facets of the same human compulsions. The result is both a story of two lovers and a meditation on how desire bends identity and reality.

Characters
Henri is drawn with a kind of austere intensity: a soldier whose reverence for order, maps, and the Napoleon myth shapes his perception of both the world and himself. His devotion to the cause gives way to a more complicated allegiance as personal loss and exposure to Venice's unruly pleasures unmoor him from rigid certainties. The novel renders his interior life with spare, often ironic detail, showing how masculine heroics can fracture in the face of emotion and sensual vulnerability.
Villanelle is flamboyant, fearless, and irrepressibly alive. She lives by appetite, of food, sex, spectacle, and storytelling, and moves through Venice with a mixture of mischievous cruelty and irresistible charm. Gender and identity are playfully unstable in her portrayal: she resists easy categorization, and her love affairs and performances probe the boundaries between domination and surrender. Together, Henri and Villanelle form a counterpoint in which passion is both the force that binds and the force that threatens to destroy.

Themes
Obsession and appetite run through the novel as both psychological drives and metaphors for political and personal allegiance. Winterson explores how devotion, to a leader, to a lover, to a set of beliefs, can become a form of hunger that consumes the self. Love here is not sentimentalized: it is risky, irrational, and capable of transfiguration as well as ruin.
The interplay of history and myth is another central concern. Napoleon's campaigns provide a stark historical backdrop, yet the novel treats those events as stages for mythmaking, where individuals invent stories to survive chaos. Questions of gender and fluid sexuality are woven into the narrative structure, challenging conventional roles and suggesting that desire itself is a creative force that reshapes identity and narrative.

Style and tone
Winterson's prose is incandescent and compact, moving from aphoristic lines to lush, sensory description. Magical-realist touches and fairytale echoes sit comfortably alongside gritty battlefield scenes and the sensory excesses of Venice's streets and kitchens. The tone ranges from ironic wit to lyric intensity, and the book's structural shifts, changes in voice, sudden surreal episodes, create a sense that narrative itself is a performance of passion.
The novel's language often foregrounds appetite and the body, making sensual imagery a primary vehicle for exploring psychological and philosophical questions. This stylistic boldness makes the book feel both modern and timeless, a fable about longing dressed in historical costume.

Reception and legacy
Since its publication in 1987, The Passion has been celebrated for its formal daring and its provocative treatment of love, gender, and history. Critics and readers have praised its imaginative fusion of historical detail and mythic invention, and it is often discussed alongside Winterson's earlier work for its feminist and queer-inflected examinations of desire. The book remains a striking example of narrative risk-taking: a novel that insists passion is itself a kind of politics, capable of overturning maps, loyalties, and selves.