[In the following review, Stuart comments on some strengths and weaknesses of Written on the Body.]

The language of love: how do you breathe life into it? How do you make it new after centuries of systematic literary abuse, top 20 toons, and the gauzy clichés of Hollywood? That is the challenge Jeanette Winterson has set herself in her latest novel, Written on the Body. “Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear?”

Presented exclusively from the perspective of the genderless narrator (a conceit really, since she is so obviously a woman enamoured of women), it is the story of the word-painter's love for Louise as it unfolds amid the memories and debris of past relationships. But Louise, the cherished “body” of the title, is ill. And so it is the shadow of death, the gravitas of disease, that dynamises and rescues love from the banality of late 20th-century life. It is love in the time of Aids (except that here the life-threatening illness is lymphatic leukaemia) where love and death cohabit like some tragic Derby and Joan, doomed but inseparable.

Just as disease disrupts the body of her beloved, so the author ruptures her story with an erudite middle section on the corpus and its responses to infection. These breaks in the narrative are a favourite technique of Winterson's, which she uses so effectively in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and The Passion to mark change and to build suspense. At its worst, though, it can seem like showing off: a sort of off-puttingly clever literary grandstanding à la Martin Amis.

However, in Written on the Body, Winterson steals the opportunity offered by digression to write some of the most riveting, soaring prose in the novel. Even if it fails to create tension, the shower of details on T-cells, blood and tissue, reinforces the lover's obsession with the object of her desire and outrage at the invasion of her territory, even when the interloper is as formidable a rival as death. “You were intimate with every muscle, privy to the eyelids moving in sleep. This is the body where your name is written, passing into the hands of strangers.”

Written on the Body has glimmers of the humour that made Oranges so popular. There is the lover whose tongue comes out in a rash after an encounter with our lesbian Lothario liberally doused in “some erotic body oil, authentic pina colada flavour.” And the creaky institution of marriage comes in for its share of scorn: “How long is it you've been married? And you don't ask him to put his head between your legs because you think he might find it distasteful.”

Then there is Winterson's characteristic willingness to take risks; the decision, for example, to present Written on the Body exclusively from the perspective of the narrator, with all its attendant dangers of seeming preachy and narcissistic, could have gone horribly wrong. With characteristic cheek, she just about gets away with it; and the solipsism of Winterson's storyteller fits in almost entirely with her depiction of the self-referential world of love.

What is irresistible about Winterson, always, is her ambition. And Written on the Body, with its grandiloquent themes of love and loss, is certainly a novel in search of greatness. But can she, like John Donne, remove the quotation marks from the words “I love you”? Finally, the answer is no. At the novel's end, a taste of “so what?” lingers in the mouth. Like the lover's writhings and whispers, the author's striving on the page may echo our collective craving for a new language of love. But in the end, it is the depth of our desire, not the thing itself, that Winterson manages to capture.