The Stone Gods [Hardcover]

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.

This book strikes me as a very good example of a mainstream "literary" fiction writer experimenting with genre, and failing horribly. Winterson is a highly respected, award-winning English author, and many friends of mine love her writing. However, this foray into speculative fiction ventures into thematic territory (namely the essentially destructive nature of humanity, both with regards to each other and the natural world) that's been deeply explored, and displays all the traits of the worst kind of strident, polemical fiction. So, while certain elements and certain scenes work fairly well, the book is really quite a chore to slog though. Had I not been reading it for my book club, I probably would have left it unfinished after the first 40-50 pages, and in our discussion, I learned that I was not the only one to feel that way. Indeed, none of us eight readers found it to be a book we could recommend to others -- even Winterson fans (of which our group has two).

The book is divided into three sections: the first takes place largely on another planet during the time dinosaurs roamed the earth, the second on Easter Island circa 1774, and the third in some relatively near-future post-World War 3 England. A version of the same heroine (with the groan-inducing name of Billie Crusoe) inhabits all three stories, and serves as an authorial proxy, a voice of conscience whose tedious inner thoughts are rendered in italics. The first story is somewhat reminiscent of the film Idiocracy, spinning a few contemporary Western cultural trends out to their extremes (such as the obsession with youth leading people to "fix" their age at a teenage level), in it, Billie is sent as part of a mission to test a promising planet for colonization. The second finds a cabin boy sailing with Captain Cook marooned on Easter Island and witness to the disintegration of the island's society. The final story is a near-future post-WWIII story following Billie as she steals a prototype artificial intelligence robot owned by the MORE corporation, which now runs the world (or at least, what we can see of it).

None of the scenarios in the book feel fresh, the time-hopping triptych narrative structure feels like a poor-person's version of Cloud Atlas, and Winterson's writing style is both pretentious and boring. Every now and then there's a nice detail, or interesting minor idea, but the book is a dud. Of course, if you've never read any speculative fiction (aka "science fiction"), I suppose you might find it more appealing than I did.