Review by New York Times Review
Jeanette Wintersons novel imagines a postapocalyptic future. THE apocalypse is coming. You'll need something to read. "The Stone Gods," Jeanette Winterson's new novel, makes an excellent choice for desertplanet reading scary, beautiful, witty and wistful by turns, dipping into the known past as it explores potential futures. Among the possibilities: Humans alter their genes to preserve youth and get plastic "macrosurgery" to exaggerate what's left. They create robot traffic cops and take Robo sapiens lovers or visit a pervertsonly sex club. Amid ecological disaster and impending war, there's also good news: a new, livable planet just discovered. But don't get your hopes up the newfound land is still home to dinosaurs. Winterson has previously pulled off such tours de force as a genderless narrator ("Written on the Body"), a magicrealist vision of the Napoleonic wars ("The Passion") and a computersavvy storyteller blurring fiction and reality ("The PowerBook"). In her essay collection, "Art Objects" (the title's second word is most appropriately parsed as a verb), she describes our attitude to difficult literature: "We want it and we don't want it, often simultaneously, and at the same time as a book is working intravenously we are working to immunize ourselves against it." True art is like a complicated lover; it seduces, then destroys and reorders the psyche, whether we want it to or not. "The Stone Gods" sets about this task with brio. In the opening section, Spike, a sexy Robo sapiens, has just come home to the Earthlike Orbus after exploring Planet Blue. She will soon be recycled for parts; her mission now is to empty herself of information to the media expert Billie Crusoe, who is also a scientist, also beautiful, and the book's primary narrator. Planet Blue gives the government an opportunity to eradicate a few nuisances. These include Billie, who stubbornly holds on to a traditional farm ("a message in a bottle from another time") and is consequently suspected of terrorism. She ships off on the very next mission along with another nuisance, a woman who's been fighting to be "fixed" as a 12yearold to please her pedophile husband and with Spike, rescued from the recycling bin by a space captain named Handsome who wants to teach her what love is. Spike, of course, would rather learn from Billie, and does in the section's final pages. Planet Blue turns out to be idyllic, just right for canoeing and long walks. But the dinosaurs mean it is uninhabitable for large human colonies, so (taking a lesson from history) the clever minds at the Central Power send an asteroid. The results are predictably disastrous for the dinosaurs and the rest of the planet, including our heroes. This potential future is also a potential past. Captain Handsome suggests that humans have done this before sent versions of ourselves to a promising new world and killed off both monsters and civilization, leaving the race to evolve back to a sophisticated state of selfdestructiveness. The pattern is recapitulated in miniature, too; in a midbook interlude set on Easter Island in 1774, one of Captain Cook's sailors watches feuding tribes cut down the island's last tree and topple each other's enormous stone idols, proving that mankind, "wherever found, Civilized or Savage, cannot keep to any purpose for much length of time, except the purpose of destroying himself." Could the future really be so bad? It's probably much worse. The novel's final section jumps to an era known as Post3 War, in a world similar to but even harsher than the Orbus of Part 1. It turns out the early version was largely fiction there is no Planet Blue, for example. In a more recognizable reality, the characters live in reduced circumstances; Spike is just a head that Billie carries in a sling, and Billie's job is to program information so that Spike, as the first Robo sapiens, may one day guide world powers rationally. When a field trip leads them into an outland of nuclear radiation, ravaged forests and castoffs with damaged souls and bodies, both will be forced to reinvent themselves. "The Stone Gods" is a Baedeker for Earth's future, with the reader as another sapiens on a world tour, being informed and programmed to make intelligent decisions. It begs the question of whether true art can be openly didactic: to make her points, Winterson deploys amounts of exposition, description and philosophical debate unusual in contemporary novels. Some sections may seem aggressively lecturing, especially given that the future described is to some degree familiar. For example, many people do believe that a cataclysmic world war and environmental devastation are just a matter of time, and robots are already here. It is when the characters truly engage with one another, rather than with their own ideas, that Winterson's story transcends the established facts and common fantasies; it becomes art, and thus makes its case most powerfully. This is, I think, her point: we grow more through feeling than through intellect. There is undeniable poignancy to the romantic scene in which the first Spike, trying to save energy during the ice age, begins to dismantle her body and finds she has a heart after all. Tenderly, Billie tries to define love for her in one last lesson: "Maybe it's recognition, perhaps discovery, sometimes it's sacrifice, always it's treasure. It's a journey on foot to another place." And Spike guesses: "I think it's the chance to be human." Winterson is an unquestionably virtuoso stylist. She can twist phrases like a vaudevillian; when Billie asks for a single drink, the bartender says, "This isn't a singles bar." Her more serious moments evoke lush emotion: "Far out, too far to see with the human eye or to hear with the human ear, is everything we have lost. ... Sometimes, in our dreams, we see the boxedup miseries and fears, orbiting two miles up, outside our little world." With sentences like these, it is hard not to feel a glimmer of hope. So whether or not you already know the fate of the Earth, read "The Stone Gods" for new discoveries in language, love and what it means to be human all things worth importing to a desert island or a new planet, or (most of all) the grim future. Susann Cokal, whose most recent novel is "Breath and Bones," is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Imaginative satirist Winterson, given to plundering her favorite literary antecedents and fascinated by ships and voyages, improvises with verve, compassion, and fury on Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in this intricately structured, emotionally lucid, time-traveling novel of discovery and survival. Billie Crusoe is a scientist in the near future who secretly resists state-approved mass illiteracy and Genetic Fixing, which ensures that everyone remains physically perfect while their ravaged planet becomes hopelessly polluted, and falls in love with Spike, a disturbingly beautiful female Robo sapiens. Meanwhile, Billy Crusoe, marooned on Easter Island when Captain James Cook and crew leave without him, witnesses the shocking inanity of a pointlessly bellicose, now-starving society that has destroyed the island's forests to build massive Stone Gods. Spinning forward again, here's Billie in dire straits in a horrifying postapocalyptic world. It's as though we're doomed to repetition, Billie says, as she contemplates humankind's practice of despoiling every pristine place we occupy. With Virginia Woolf's Orlando as her template, literary prowess to burn, and an incandescent passion for life, Winterson critiques human folly in myriad forms and laments the pillaging and poisoning of the earth in this mordantly funny, fast-paced, and elegiac speculative novel, in which books literally save a life.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Prize-winning Brit Winterson applies her fantastical touch to a sci-fi, postapocalyptic setting. Heroine Billie Crusoe appears in three different end-of-the-world scenarios, allowing Winterson to explore the repetitive and destructive nature of human history and an inability (or unwillingness) of people to learn from previous mistakes. In the first section, inhabitants of the pollution-choked planet Orbus have discovered Planet Blue (Earth), and soon set about launching an asteroid at it to kill the dinosaurs that would prevent them from colonizing the planet. The second and third sections are set on Earth in 1774 and then in the "Post-3 War" era. Though passionate condemnations of global warming and war appear frequently, the book also contains a triptych love story: Billie meets Spike, a female "Robo sapien" capable of emotion and evolution, and falls (reluctantly) in love with her. In each of the scenarios, Billie and Spike (or versions of them) fall in love anew while encroaching annihilation looms in the background. Winterson's lapses into polemic can be tedious, but her prose-as stunning, lyrical and evocative as ever-and intelligence easily carry the book. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
On the heels of a critical book about her work (Jeanette Winterson: A Contemporary Critical Guide) comes this ninth novel by Winterson (Sexing the Cherry). Taking on humanity's mindless reliance on technology and the resulting environmental devastation, the story opens in a future where the ability to genetically "fix" oneself at any age is but one example of how new solutions create new problems-in this case, men desiring ever younger females. But such dilemmas pale in the face of one overwhelming reality: humans have worn out the planet. So they decide to move to Planet Blue. Unfortunately, doing so proves much more difficult than anticipated. This book is a tour de force that skips backward in time, with all sections involving a woman named Billie or a man named Billy, reinforcing the theme that we repeat our mistakes, that "Everything is imprinted forever with what it once was." Billie is a fascinating character, as is her beloved Spike, the first Robo sapiens. While some readers might not care for the kaleidoscopic structure or eroticism, this beautifully written book is nevertheless recommended for all libraries.-Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Characters named Billie Crusoe, Friday and Captain Handsome make it hard to take this novel as seriously as the author does. The latest from the eclectically adventurous Winterson (Lighthousekeeping, 2005 etc.) is equal parts meta fiction and science fiction. She conjures a world--presumably Earth, but here called Orbus--on the verge of environmental ruin, but most of its inhabitants are more concerned with their perennially youthful appearances. As a rebel who rejects her society's values, Billie (initially a woman, though apparently a man in a later chapter) finds herself exiled as an outer-space explorer to colonize Planet Blue, where conditions appear to allow mankind to survive (and ultimately ruin another planet). Her frequent companion and potential lover is Spike, a robot in the form of an irresistible female. Actually Spike is a "Robo sapiens," who has the potential to evolve to a higher level than humans. Within a novel where "time has become its own tsunami," Billie skips back and forth across the centuries, sailing the 18th-century seas with Captain Cook and stumbling through the radioactive cinders of Post-3 War, with Spike as a disembodied head (who develops an appetite for oral sex). As silly as all this sounds, Winterson employs the plot as a backdrop for an environmental manifesto, making grand pronouncements--"History is not a suicide note--it is a record of our survival"; "Perhaps the universe is a memory of our mistakes"--amid allusions to Beckett, Sartre and Camus, as well as the inevitable Dafoe. Just in case the reader starts wondering what exactly this novel is about, the novel tells us. Exactly. After Billie finds a copy of a book titled The Stone Gods, Spike asks her what it's about. "A repeating world," replies Billie, a world in which every end is a fresh beginning and every beginning anticipates an apocalypse. Vonnegut did it better. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
