The Stone Gods

Taking a hard look at ourselves adrift a deep blue pool of imagination. And a page turner too. Take a few deep breaths as you go in.

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.

The first novel I’d read by JW. Thought the section about Easter Island was superb, but in other places the book resembled a polemic. I’m not saying I’d never revisit this author, but I won’t be rushing to her other work.

A powerful read, amusing, depressing, ultimately thought-provoking. A book with purpose, but rich and enjoyable. I would make all humans read it if I could. My favourite Winterson read so far.

A good read, great components but by no means an easy read, be ready to have to work to read your book

I liked this book and enjoyed reading it. I felt it was reminiscent of David Mitchell's "The Cloud Atlas" (or The Cloud Atlas is reminscent of this - I don't know which came first) and I liked the interweaving of the stories. I really enjoyed the 18th century section focussing on the adventures of a sailor on one of Cook's voyages. However, there is just one thing wrong with this - why does everything have to be about sex?? I get that it's an important theme to the author (homosexual love is in all of her books) but sometimes it's just too much. I found it so here, definitely. And it's not because it was love of a homosexual nature - it was just that it was too much sex full stop. Unbelievably, I really do think that it's possible to write a good book without including all the bonking. I liked it - but it's not the best speculative fiction I've ever read; all the rumpy pumpy and obsessing about sex ruined it for me.

I have to admit that I quite enjoyed the first half of this book, athough the writing style took a little getting used to, but then after the first section the story just peters out and is not very easy to follow, and to be honest it just becomes very dull and tedious. I feel that if the book had been a novella, and had ended at the end of the first section of the story (about half the book) then I would have enjoyed it a lot more. As it is, it just becomes dull, tedious and confusing and was not a pleasure to read. I wish I had stopped after the first section. I cannot recommend this book, although I am told that some of her other work is of a higher standard.

a set of books that need to be read in sequence it is amazing what you learn about your self

One of the best books I have read this year. Also a welcome inspirational defrag of a few stagnant values hanging around in me with no place to be .. thank you Jeanette Winterstone

As a longtime Winterson fan, I was naturally curious to see how this novel would stack up against earlier work. Divided into 4 sections, it begins in a futuristic Orwellian dystopia hardly more than an exaggeration of our own. Winterson has fun with her cynical narrator, seemingly transplanted from some noir detective novel, but the "Blade Runner" ambiance doesn't prevent her from exercising her trademark literary gifts: breathtakingly metaphysical turns of phrase, rhapsodic intensities of feeling, insights about human nature that cut to the bone. The second section takes place on Easter Island in the 18th century and recalls the author's historically appropriate literary style in "Sexing the Cherry," though here the parallels with her futuristic vision are made obvious. Parts 3 and 4 work as a continuous prequel to Part 1 (or perhaps an alternative narrative) in the same dystopia and with the same protagonist, with situations in which Winterson mines comic possibilities of the narrator carrying around the head of the robotic "robo sapiens" in a sling, as well as a passage powerfully depicting the specter of post-nuclear mutants rising up against the state. "The Stone Gods" is unabashedly entertaining while being ambitiously interwoven in structure, powerful in expression. One can find examples of more intriguing science fiction and maybe more imaginative glimpses into the future; and some heterosexual readers may be irritated at how all chance encounters seem to involve exclusively homosexual liasons. But as one who was as much in thrall to the metaphysical poetry of John Donne as is Winterson, to him who expressed his romancing a woman with the lines, She is all States, all Princes I, Nothing else is. I can easily identify with her transports, her rhapsodies. What she succeeds in communicating is not merely the intensities of personal love but a passion for the planet itself.

Profetico e intrigante

I think if the book had ended after "The Planet Blue" segment (noting that it would then have a been just a novella) it would have been better served. The whole repetition them is shopworn at best, tedious at worst. On the plus side, Billy and Spike are a fun duo, even if she ran out of a plot line.

A story that begins in what appears to be the distant future then takes a detour to Easter island of several hundred years ago. How does it fit together? Most interestingly as the story continues on and somehow comes full circle. The author does a nice job of creating a very different places, populating them with interesting characters and giving them reasons to take the actions they do. A pleasant surprise from an author I was unfamiliar with VFL.