Past and future worlds echo through captivating 'Stone Gods'
The Stone Gods
By Jeanette Winterson
Harcourt, 224 pp., $24
With her new novel "The Stone Gods," British author Jeanette Winterson turns her conscience, vivid imagination, and keen insight to a cautionary tale about our complex relationship to technology and our fragile balance with the world in which we live. Part apocalyptic sci-fi adventure, part love story, part polemical essay, "The Stone Gods" gives us three different, but painfully similar, scenarios that evoke the idea of repeating worlds - if only things had been done slightly differently. In Winterson's darkly whimsical and persuasive satire, the outcomes remain essentially the same. Humankind screws it up.
It takes a while to get the lay of the land in "The Stone Gods." The opening section on the planet Orbus is rather graceless and perfunctory. Through the wry, sarcastic voice of protagonist Billie Crusoe (the reference to Robinson is surely intentional), Winterson more describes the society than lets us discover its unique dynamic through Billie's relationships to others. We are told about the futuristic technology and power structure, and the de rigeur cosmetic alterations and "genetic fixing" that have turned out young, boringly beautiful people. The backlash is that men start to crave sex with children and women are drawn to ugly bad boys. "We're all perverts now," Billie bemoans.
The bigger problem is that Orbus is rapidly dying from long abuse, and plans are made to colonize another planet, Planet Blue. "The new planet offers us the opportunity to do things differently. . . . This time we'll be more careful. This time we will learn from our mistakes." However, first they'll have to figure out what to do with all the planet's dinosaurs.
Billie is both profoundly hopeful and skeptical. She works for the department of Enhancement, which tries to persuade people to live in ways that are good for them and the community. But the maverick antiheroine has grown increasingly disillusioned with the party line, and her outspoken independence gets her shipped off in one of the first missions to Planet Blue, along with a beautiful rogue "robosapiens" named Spike, with whom she has fallen in love. Though the story takes on a kind of "Lost in Space" tone, Billie's voice softens, becomes more lyrical with "the clean emptiness of another chance," and Winterson's descriptions, reflections, and revelations take on a searing beauty and poetic eloquence.
The second part travels back in time, to another, earlier world. It unfolds in 1774 on Easter Island, where a young Dutch sailor named Billy has been abandoned by his ship when Captain Cook and the crew set off abruptly. It's no wonder - the once-verdant island has already been ravaged by two warring clans, one of whom has felled most of the trees to support and move the island's famous stone gods. The other destroys the last remaining trees in spite. Billy astutely chronicles the destructive, all-too-familiar behavior of the natives, finding solace and love with a half-Dutch, half-native young man named Spikkers. It is both prequel and deja vu.
Part three catapults Billie to a "Post-3 War" era, after Iran has launched a nuclear attack on the US and global warming has had catastrophic consequences. In this alternate reality, which seems chillingly on target, a prophet-like Spike is now only a head, developed to make the "planet-sized decisions that human beings are so bad at." Billie and Spike's illicit relationship leavens Winterson's vision of a "brutal, stupid, money-soaked drunken binge of a twenty-first-century world."
In each possible future, possible past, it is the redeeming quality of love that grounds each story. But it is the last scenario in which Winterson lets loose her most eloquent writing, from horrific descriptions of war victims to compelling examinations of human nature. It is not for strictly linear readers, but for those willing to dive into a thought-provoking if messy stew of ideas and insights about who we are and why we seem driven to destroy the place we call home. "The Stone Gods" is nothing less than an impassioned plea for reason and peace.
Karen Campbell is a freelance writer based in Brookline.
