Books like The Stone Gods

When I bought my copy of The Stone Gods, the bookseller told me two things: it had received strong reviews, and “It’s science fiction, you know.” I parried this last one with some fuzzy comment that much of Winterson’s fiction violates expectations, and we left it at that, both sounding smart and not having said much.And then I started reading: sure enough, page after page, the thing read true to the sci-fi genre. And not just in the details: it sounded like sci-fi, it thought like sci-fi, it even carried sci-fi’s common politics—as much genre work tends to be, it sounded downright reactionary. The main character, Billie Crusoe, sounded as if she had actually been beamed into her era from our own; she spoke constantly of the contrast between then and now, as if she’d been witness to our time, and was quite conscientiously leading us through hers, tour-guide style, with heavy asides to the reader and a general lack of believable selfhood.I was a bit taken aback; in fact, at several points, I had to remind myself of Winterson’s previous work—I said to myself, in fact, “prose this obvious, this flat and predictable, has been put in place for a reason.” And even fifty pages from the end, after the place and the style had shifted radically—several times, in fact—I was still sitting a few seats back in the auditorium, wondering whether she knew what she was up to.But the connection comes—again and again, in surprising, subtle, parallel, spooky ways. In fact, much of the intersection is rightly described as spooky; quantum, in fact. As she did in Gut Symmetries, Winterson spends a lot of time pulling on the greater metaphor of quantum physics as she sees it mirrored in human life: it would not be a stretch to say that this book, as was Gut Symmetries, is something of a quantum novel, and that Billie Crusoe, strange particle that she is, exists outside of Newtonian plotting: where we want characters to make choices and suffer results—we want them to see three doors, walk through one, then lose forever what was behind the other two—Billie exists simultaneously in all three. The book travels through three different frames of time and space, and she is there—not only that, she is reading about herself in a manuscript left on the Tube, and she is stumbling across her own adventures in the journals of Captain Cook. At every turn, she meets human short-sightedness: waste, folly, power. And at every turn, she ends up in a dead world, one sacrificed on the altar of power, but with the promise of a new birth coming soon—a new planet, a new peace, a new sapiens—that will never make the same mistakes again. And this hits on one of the themes running through: the impossibility of denying the limbic, the spooky, the unreal. It’s not emotion that kills us off, it’s control. It’s our fear of a world more complex, less divided, and less clear that leads us to kill off the potential that exists when control falls away. We see this in the corporate governance of MORE, and we see this in the war between the Ariki Mau and the Bird Man on Easter Island. We see this, too, in the Robo sapiens, free of the unpredictability of emotion, to lead us from the damage of our own fuzzy natures. It’s clear, though, that the obsessive attempts to hide from our fuller selves have brought on our ending.It was clear to me that the novel was, in part, Winterson’s response to the upsurge in media/commodity culture and feel-good authoritarianism that seems to be cresting so fervently at this time. Initially, I thought to myself, “what a shame that the novel will end up such a didactic response—so flat and obvious.” With the patters apparent, though, I see that the “message” of the book, in fact, is nowhere near as easy and flat as the initial section seems to belie. Maybe I’m a sucker for flash and experimentation, but the risk that Winterson took in the Stone Gods felt—to me—brave, insightful, and revelatory. It’s certainly not her first foray into these waters, nor is it the first book to reinvent linear narrative; however, the mission it takes and the tools it picks match up perfectly. I’m glad I stuck it through.