The Stone Gods
Jeanette Winterson
Araminta Matthews, MFA
Jeanette Winterson is a powerful writer. Perhaps the epitome of
the feminine literary voice, Winterson has long been my favorite
author. For her unique convergence of multi-layered,
multi-dimensional, multi-sexed prose and for the ambiguity of her
characters' gender roles and sexual identity, Jeanette Winterson has
captivated me as a reader since first I picked up her book Oranges Are
Not the Only Fruit ten years ago and every book I have read by her
since. Now, Winterson has brought us a more recent rendition of
her genius: The Stone Gods, and it is truly as powerful as any
other work in her collection
True to Winterson form, however ethereal that form may normally be, The
Stone Gods tells a multi-layered love story. Unlike much of her
previous work, however, The Stone Gods bends speculative fiction tilt
which is slightly more science fiction than her normal fantastical
writing style. Beginning in the future, Winterson tells a story
of a woman (or is it a woman? for like a true feminist, Winterson
sees no need to distinguish the gender identity of her hero/ine until
it becomes necessary). Billie, an old-school farmer and dog-owner
on a planet known for its lack of genuine nature, works for a company
which screens candidates for genetic reconstruction: old women
can be "fixed" to look thirteen for the rest of their lives; old men
can grow extra arms, stand ten feet tall, and look like any star they
can imagine. In Billie's work, she stumbles upon Spike, a Robo
Sapiens designed to emulate an unreasonably beautiful woman.
Billie and Spike become smitten with one another.
The crux of the story lies in a perhaps too realistic idea:
Orbus, the planet on which Billie and Spike reside, is dying. Too
many people, too much pollution, too many controversies. Orbus
cannot support life, but all is not lost. A corporation,
capitalism at its finest, has funded a mission to explore a new planet
that promises to support human life afresh: Planet Blue, and it
comes equipped with real nature. Through a series of twists and
corners, Billie and Spike land on this planet 65 million years before
it will be known as modern day Earth, presumably.
This story splices seamlessly with a story of a man, Billy,
ship-wrecked on Easter Island in 1774. Winterson uses this tale
to parallel the story of Billie and Spike, ship-wrecked on Planet
Blue. The idea of love found between two creatures dissimilar and
the same all at once is both moving and peaceful. And, like
the mother of modernist gender examination, Virginia Woolf's Orlando,
which tells of a person who traverses time and gender identity, The
Stone Gods seems to create the same gender/time paradox in a more
appropriate manner for the modern world: before the backdrop of
global doom.
Wrapping over itself, the story flows into the final tale of
modern-day, modern-Earth Billie just after the "Third World War".
Billie works for a company that has built the first Robo Sapiens for
the new world. And sure enough, Billie and Spike are reunited in
new forms.
Winterson is truly a mistress of the word. Having created a new
sensation of literature: the feminine voiced novel, the
multi-folded text, Winterson brings us yet another beautifully rendered
story of gender, love, identity, sociology, activism, and quirky
tidbits of history. I recommend this, and all of her books.
She truly is a modern great.