The Passion

The Passion is Jeanette Winterson's second novel, published in 1987 and awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. It is nominally historical fiction, set during the Napoleonic wars, but it treats history as one ingredient among several, and the Venice it describes was written before Winterson had ever been there.

The book is told in two voices. Henri, who joins the army because a young man in his village has no better answer to what his life might become, describes the mud and cold of the camps and the absurdity of serving dinner to an emperor who eats while his army starves. Villanelle, who grows up in a city that treats chance as a form of art, describes an affair, a marriage and the wager she loses. Her Venice is a place where fortunes are made and lost at cards and nobody finds that remarkable.

Their stories meet on the retreat from Moscow, where a group of soldiers desert and Villanelle becomes their guide, and the second half belongs to her city and to the consequences of what the two of them do there. Passion here is closer to an illness or a gamble than to romance, and the novel is most interested in people who feel it differently and cannot quite forgive one another for that.