'The Stone Gods,' a novel by Jeanette Winterson
BOOK REVIEW
Imagining a plundered, media-plagued Earth
MAYBE a prodigy, certainly a rebel with a divine knack for metaphoric invention -- this might describe Jeanette Winterson as a child. In her self-exploratory debut novel, "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit," the protagonist, like the author, was given up for adoption to a rigorously evangelical couple and discovers her powers as a revivalist speaker shortly before discovering her lesbian love for another girl.
A few decades, many prizes and numerous impassioned and original fictional worlds later, Winterson hasn't changed her spots, let alone her fierce moral stance. Her newest novel, "The Stone Gods," contains bold scientific hypotheses, enough anger to topple mountains and the imaginative assurance of a sleepwalker pirouetting on a tight wire.
And while this emotionally charged dream is sustained over considerable time (about 65 million years), it feels heart-stoppingly immediate on nearly every page.
Winterson's early novels, notably the seductive "Written on the Body," were focused on questions of personal identity, the slippery "I." In this latest tale, the successive voices emphasize a "We" -- in fact, "The Stone Gods" purports to be nothing less than our own collective, planetary story.
The project could not feel more urgent, in these preapocalyptic years of the 21st century in which the fires of "contained" wars mix with searing pollution and poverty, and powerful nations' governments look like puppets jigging for the super-rich.
The story opens on Orbus, a plundered and media-plagued planet that resembles Earth a little ways down the timeline. Girl scientist Billie Crusoe is giving a boosterish presentation of a newly discovered, colonizable world. On Planet Blue, "everything is trial-size; tread-on-me tiny or blurred-out-of-focus huge. There are leaves that have grown as big as cities, and there are birds that nest in cockleshells."
Already the reader is being deftly jarred out of logical expectations and prepped for wonders and terrors. Evidently, Winterson couldn't care less that this science-fictional Earth's-end terrain has been well trodden recently by such other nongenre writers as Michel Houellebecq and Cormac McCarthy. She has her own ideas about what's out there and about what's inside us -- in other words, about what it means to be human.
