[In the following excerpt, Craig offers a mixed assessment of Gut Symmetries.]

Anyone who reads fiction knows there is a male canon and a female one. Perhaps the present-day preference for Amis or Atwood is simply a matter of temperament, or perhaps it goes back to Richardson and Fielding and the masculine assertion for sense over sensibility. Yet the true reader, like the true writer, is concerned with more than gender; and to hide behind it is to render us something less than human.

Jeanette Winterson and A. L. Kennedy are two of the leading writers of the new generation. Both are female and have won many prizes. One has gone from wild popularity as an outspoken lesbian to a chorus of (largely male) disapprobation; the other received the accolade of being a 1996 Booker judge, and benefits from the current exaltation of Scottish writing. A. L. Kennedy has been compared to Winterson, and both, as it happens, have written about passion and physics in their present books.

Gut Symmetries describes a love-triangle between Alice, Jove and Stella. In between charting the progress of the affair from its flirtatious beginning to a gruesome climax on a yacht near Capri, each protagonist recounts the circumstance of his or her origin. There are distinct similarities to Candia McWilliam's Debatable Lands, which include enjoyable meditations on emigration and a welcome return to the stylised comedy that made Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit a success. If the narrative voices are virtually indistinguishable, the author has clearly benefited from writing screenplays; the dialogue is in sprightly contrast to the monologues.

Winterson's attempts to link physics to passion read like The Song of Solomon as recounted by the cast of Star Trek. If this is not a novel of ideas, it isn't for want of trying. The title itself is a pun on intestines and the Grand Unified Theories of modern physics—thus perfectly encapsulating both Winterson's self-consciousness and her lack of it.

When she writes simply, and about the observed world, she is marvellous—“wind-mad plants,” “gargoyled with grief,” “sun like a disc saw” are memorable metaphors. It is depressing to see such a talent repeatedly go off-beam out of an appetite for intellectual posturing; there are benefits to writing from within the ghetto, but unacceptable penalties also. When Alice tells us “some people dream in colour, I feel in colour, strong tones that I hue down for the comfort of the pastelly inclined,” she seems to be speaking for the author. Mature writing, like mature feeling, is not, however, a matter of choosing between violent colours or girlish pastels.