The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson (2007)
“God spoke crow – But what loved the stones
And spoke stone? – They seemed to exist too”
– Crow’s Theology by Ted Hughes
“To build the Stone Gods, the island has been destroyed, and now the Stone Gods are themselves destroyed”
“I ‘ve brought something with me that you might like to read. It’s in my bag. It’s called The Stone Gods. I found it on the Underground last night.
What’s it about?
A repeating world”
Gods, stone shaped or otherwise, are never going to save the world. We may pray to a spirit in the sky but there in reality there is no guiding spirit above, only the vastness of space.
Jeanette Winterson
The world, as imagined by Jeanette Winterson, is one in which Humans are an endangered species not because they have been damned by God but because they have the vanity and stupidity to imagine that the planet’s resources are limitless.
She takes the reader forward and back in time but the story is the same no matter what the era.
Sometime in the not too distant future the old planet Orbus (Earth by another name) is dying. Or, to put it in Orwellian terms, it is “evolving in a way that is hostile to human life”. Its projected life span is around half a century
The good news is that a new planet (Planet Blue) has been found – the bad news is that it is inhabited by dinosaurs. We have been here before. We know how worlds begin and, so long as we don’t allow ourselves to be distracted by false Gods, we should have a fair idea how they end.
Sometime in the not so distant past (Easter Island 1774) a pristine and abundant environment that seems capable of sustaining life indefinitely becomes a wasteland through the plundering of mankind in all its infinite ignorance.
Winterson is a writer who is not noted for Science Fiction and is reluctant to concede that this novel is of that genre. “It is fiction with science in it”, she hedges on her website. She speculates about the pitfalls of inhabiting other planets and whether it’s a good ideas to invent robots to run and police our lives .
Her vision of the future as “hi-tech, hi-stress, hi-mess life” is anything but utopian but she is not pretending to tell us anything we don’t already know. What the futuristic time-frame does provide is a framework for satirical attacks on the excesses and distractions of the consumer society.
The miracle of genetic fixing allows women to be eternally young for their men but brings no happiness or immortality. Robots are built to carry out mundane tasks and to offer objective advice on how to save the world from conflict. These robots are a source of humour rather than fear – a security force are CanCops (“soup cans with the power of arrest”), BeatBots are android traffic wardens (“these types were inhuman, and it made sense to build them than to hire them”); there are even cute robotic pets – Robo-paws.
A glamorous female android Spike observes at one point: “Human beings often display emotion they do not feel. And they often feel emotions they do not display”.
The novel follows a non linear narrative which Winterson justifies on the grounds that she is merely following a train of thought. It’s not always easy to follow her reasoning although by the end her female logic becomes clear.
And there’s no real surprises that the notion of sustainable economic growth is shown for the pipedream it always was or to be told that “capitalism is like Japanese Knotwood, nothing kills it off”. This, after all, is a repeating world where the errors of our past are played out in the present.
While many will build effigies to false Gods, , the rest are resigned to the fact that we are not part of some master-plan. As Winterson puts it : “randomness is not a mistake in the equation – it is part of the equation”.
In the course of the novel the following songs are referred to by name:
- Maybe This Time – Liza Minelli’s Cabaret tune .
- My Way (presumably by Sinatra, though Sid Vicious’ version would not be out of place)
- Metal Guru – T.Rex
My alternative soundtrack would include:
- Spirit In The Sky – Norman Greenbaum
- In the Year 2525 – Zager & Evans
- Fitter Happier – Radiohead
- The Robots – Kraftwerk
- If I Only Had A Heart – Jack Haley (Tin Man in Wizard of Oz)
- One More Robot, Sympathy 3000-21 – Flaming Lips
- Space is Deep – Hawkwind
- Truth is Dark Like Outer Space – Evangelista
