Jeanette Winterson

The stone gods

Beatrix

The Stone Gods

Sarah Sammis

I like to give myself a few days between finishing a book and reviewing a book to reflect on my reading experience. The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson is a perfect example of why I do this. My initial reaction was "is this all there is to it?" but the book continues to come back to me.

The book is somewhere between a collection of short stories and a novel. The best explanation is in the book itself on page 146:

 'What's it about?'

 'A repeating world.'

Except it isn't quite. Events repeat but the locations are different. The character names are the same: always Billie and Spike but the times and locations are always different.

With a protagonist named Billie Crusoe, it's obvious that Stone Gods is influenced in part by Robinson Crusoe but there are also nods to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Barsoom series among others.

Each chapter or story is one of travel and isolation. Billie is either a loner and non-conformist in society, or trapped in a snow storm, or on an island, or in a burned out society. Some how at her side is the faithful Spike.

Daryl Houston

This one was a slow start for me and felt like pretty crappy science fiction. Toward the middle, I began to feel more optimistic and even started to like it, but then it devolved into something resembling Pynchonian slapstick that I found pretty annoying (as I often do when Pynchon does it). I found it a real labor; it's a small book that took me five or six days to wade through. Maybe a closer reading than I gave it would have been more rewarding.

mbbs

The Stone Gods is one of Jeanette Winterson's most imaginative novels about love. On the airwaves, all the talk is of the new blue planet - pristine and habitable, like our own 65 million years ago, before we took it to the edge of destruction. And off the air, Billie and Spike are falling in love. What will happen when their story combines with the world's story, as they whirl towards Planet Blue, into the future? Will they - and we - ever find a safe landing place? Jeanette Winterson OBE, whose writing has won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and the E.M. Forster Award, is the author of some of the most purely imaginative and pleasurable novels of recent times, from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit to her first book for children, Tanglewreck. She is also the author of the essays Art Objects. Visit her website at www.jeanettewinterson.com

Lindy

After rendering the planet unlivable, humankind begins to colonize a new blue planet, and heroine Billie Crusoe embarks on a futuristic adventure that explores humankind's relationship to the environment, power, and technology and assesses what it is that makes us human. By the author of Lighthousekeeping. Reprint.

The Stone Gods is one of Jeanette Winterson's most imaginative novels -- an interplanetary love story; a traveller's tale; a hymn to the beauty of the worldOn the airwaves, all the talk is of the new blue planet - pristine and habitable, like our own 65 million years ago, before we took it to the edge of destruction. And off the air, Billie and Spike are falling in love. What will happen when their story combines with the world's story, as they whirl towards Planet Blue, into the future? Will they - and we - ever find a safe landing place?Jeanette Winterson OBE, whose writing has won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and the E.M. Forster Award, is the author of some of the most purely imaginative and pleasurable novels of recent times, from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit to her first book for children, Tanglewreck. She is also the author of the essays Art Objects. Visit her website at www.jeanettewinterson.com

The stone gods

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