THE STONE GODS
Jeanette Winterson’s “The Stone Gods” isn’t a late-at-night-tired-to-the-bone novel, but rather one to savour slowly in the quite spaces and places of the soul. I read it in a tired state of mind and couldn’t give Winterson’s lyrical, dense prose the care and attention it deserves.
It’s about Billie Crusoe who falls in love with Spike - a robo-sapiens “that looks and acts human, that can evolve like a human” but also about much more. It’s about a world fucked over by humans who blast off into space in search of a new beginning - to explore the Blue Planet.
In my tired-to-the-bone state of mind I lost the plot halfway through and “The Stone Gods” is going back on Mount TBR. I already know that it is a thing of beauty. It quotes Shakespeare’s Sonnet 109
For nothing this wide universe I call
Save thou, my rose; in it thou art my all.
In a conversation between Billie and Spike it describes that most precious of human emotions, love and its dangers in this way;
I want to touch you.
And if you touch me what then?
I would find a language of new beginning.
And you once voyaged would be my free and wild place that I would never try to tame.
And the place that you are would never be sold or exchanged.
I want to begin this with you,
You can’t love me. You don’t know me.
Can you only love what you know?
Or is love what you don’t know?
Love is an intervention.
Hand over hand, beginning the descent of you. Hand over hand, too fast, like my heartbeat. This is the way down, the cliff, the cave. No safety, no certainty of return.
It also describes the folly of war;
One of the many, many things I hate about war is how it trivializes the personal, The big themes, the broad sweep, the emergency measures, the national identity, all the things a particular kind of man with a particular kind of power urges adores, these are the things that become important. War gives the lie to the personal, drowns it in meetings, alarms, sacrifices. The personal is only allowed to return as death. Death is what war is good at.
I’ll read “The Stone Gods” again someday in a quiet space and place somewhere in a sea-side hideaway far from the maddening crowd