The Stone Gods - Jeanette Winterson

worst than gut symmetries...

After the brilliance of Lighthousekeeping JW slumps back to more recent form with this atrocious book. I've bought all JW's books over the years, but have to admit this is the first one i couldn't finish. Dull & uninspiring.

Daft woman doesn't think her book is Science Fiction

Until she's proud of what she's written and less bothered about winning some literature prize - I suggest you do not bother buying her books.

Thoughtful if a bit sentimental

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.

Entertaining, moving, thought provoking

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?