The Stone Gods [Paperback]

In this poetical novel, Winterson provides three interlinked stories, the love affair between a woman and an artificial lifeform on a dying planet seeking an exodus to a new world, the tale of cabin boy abandoned on a Pacfic Island in 1774, and a woman in a near future post apocalyptic world developing an artificial intelligence.

Unsurprisingly, Winterson's foray into science fiction isn't in the "Captain Zorg shoots the Meequons" school. This is science fiction as a critique of contemporary society in the mold of Shelley's Frankenstein or Huxley's Brave New World.

The fundamental theme of the novel is an environmental one, that the human race is destined to destroy its surroundings, and will do that from the micro scale of an island to the macro of a planet. Within this central theme there are many other musings, it being our fate not to learn from our mistakes as a society or personally, the interplay of masculinity and femininity, global politics - the interrelation of capitalism, post soviet russia and the islamic world, even the relative merits (and evils) of state and corporate monopolies.

In style the first story feels like the film "Brazil", the second like any number of south sea adventures, the third has elements of "Mad Max".

So is it recommended ? Absolutely. The prose style is unique, but always gripping, there are some laugh out loud moments, and at times it had me close to tears.

In summary - brilliant but barking mad - what else would you expect from Winterson?

If you're thinking about buying this book, you're going to get no help at all in your decision-making from its jacket. This book sports not a single review quotation. Not on the front cover nor on the back cover. Not in support of the blurb on the front flap nor after the biography on the back flap. And not on any of the eight blank pages at the end of the book that make you think there'll be another twist to the story when in fact it's finished (don't you just hate that?).

Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods needs, it seems, no introduction, no recommendation, no testimonial. Jeanette Winterson is Literature, so the newspaper reviewers tell me. They also tell me that this story belongs to that category known as sci-fi. Does it? That's news to me. I don't do sci-fi. If it is sci-fi, it's in the tradition of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale rather than Frank Herbert's Dune.

The novel comes in three parts. Three apocalyptic scenarios. The same story; the story of how the human race can bring about its environment's complete destruction, without thinking about it until it's too late. Scary stuff. Depressing stuff too.

There are also three love stories - all rather too sentimental for my taste. Too many long sentences weaving poetically around at 11 at night (the only time this tired mother-of-two gets to read) do me no good at all. But then there are two 'hidden' love stories - the love a tiny baby has for its mother and the love we all have for Earth, our home - which really began to hit some vein of truth.

Although this will not rate as my favourite book of all time, it did make me think. About climate change, about rampant consumerism and where it might lead us. About what it would take to shake the West out of its blind adoration of the great god Economic Growth, and about what might happen if it's already too late. It also got me thinking about extinction. Not just the extinction of the dinosaurs, nor of hundreds of species of plants and animals each day, but my own extinction, and by extension the extinction of the planet. It made me feel what it might be like to know for certain there is no hope. No life after death. No new blue planet to migrate to in silver spaceships when we're done destroying this one.

And the book made me cry.

Renowned for her comic narratives, and perhaps concealed by them, Jeanette Winterson's last novel but one is a poetic lament, sung for a world in what the author supposes to be its last throes. Unquestionably passionate and at times dazzling in its invention, The Stone Gods is another of those science-fiction novels originated by the throng of unlikely writers who mean to transcend the boundaries of mere genre into high art.

Excusing for a moment the insulting presumption begged by such a trend, the net result has been an influx of predictably high-minded chaff, but from amongst the multitude several noteworthy new voices have sounded. From Margaret Atwood's recent speculative dalliances through to The Road, the naturalistic grounding that has suffused sci-fi of late has imparted upon it a gratifying sense of literary importance, and considered readers will be glad to add Winterson to the ranks of writers drawn out of their comfort zones to grace a genre held very dear indeed.

The Stone Gods is a tale of three Billies: two women - one on the run in the far-flung future with which the book begins, and another escapee, an orphan from the not-too-distant, to close out the spitfire narrative - and, at the axis around which the novel revolves, a young explorer. He is an abandoned on Easter Island after the errant gunfire of Captain Cook's landing party forces his companions to beat a quick retreat, and here at the heart of the story, amongst the natives and the titular stone statues that stagger to this day, the significance of Billy's masculinity hardly needs the emphasis of the phallogocentric societies from which the women run.

But gender inequalities are not the great threat of Winterson's novel; the menace of The Stone Gods is, inescapably, humanity itself. The great carvings that tower around Easter Island are a remarkable expression of our capabilities as a people - they are an awesome feat indeed, created from little but tireless endeavour and dedication, but what desolation the tribes that crafted them have wrought in their creation. In the end, the island is made barren; its resources are exhausted, taken for all they had and all they could have had. Centuries ago and in the vacuum of isolation that Easter Island represents, Winterson posits, humanity created Gods, and in so doing destroyed a world. And in a future slightly advanced from our own, Orbus - a planet not unlike Earth - is on the verge of a similar sort of ruin.

The two tales that bookend The Stone Gods do much to finesse the motif that emerges so figuratively from the tale of Easter Island. These Billies are much alike, in spirit and in situation. They each hearken back to simpler, more natural times - one makes her home on Orbus' last remaining farm and the other lives for a mother she can never know - and both their worlds are dominated by MORE, a family of corporations whose business is without borders. MORE is the law, the doctor and the robotic home-help; MORE can deliver the present and assure the future. Each of the Billies is complicit in the excess that MORE symbolises. Cynical and miserable, their parallel lives are enlivened by opportunity as fate splinters them from the faceless industry. The cycle that repeats throughout The Stone Gods is broken at last: the seemingly inescapable momentum that Winterson builds with her fragmentary narrative is stopped - or slowed, at the least. There is a chance, then. For the Billies and, perhaps, for us as well.

However plausible the self-inflicted end of humankind might be, it does not prove so easy to suspend disbelief for all of The Stone Gods. Some of the tropes Winterson makes use of are outmoded already, and a few are startlingly unimaginative - a capital sci-fi crime indeed. Amongst such a wealth of more convincingly drawn concepts, however, only the bloody-minded are likely to focus on any single misstep for long. Relayed in addictive, bite-size instalments, the respective journeys of the three Billies whip along at light-speed. More jarring are Winterson's frequent lapses into self-indulgence; her overlong lectures on future history stop an otherwise pacey narrative dead in its tracks. But surely the greatest flaw of The Stone Gods is its very nature: expect subtlety and nuance to take seats in the back of a whole other room when the prospect to make a polemic of the novel arises. The cover blurb even boasts of as much.

Certainly, then, The Stone Gods is imperfect. A little refinement - a clearer sense of its purpose, for a start - would have elevated its already considerable reach still higher. But Winterson is a wordsmith with few peers, and her first incursion into genre territory proves a resounding success otherwise. Funny and matter-of-fact, playful as it takes on the end of the world and beyond, The Stone Gods is an empowering tale for our times. Compulsive reading, if not quite compulsory.