WHAT DISTINGUISHES the novel from the story is a concern with form as well as content. Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Godsis a story about love. But it is a novel about story-telling. It places narrative endeavour at the heart of personal identity: through telling stories of who we are, where we came from and how our world evolved, we reinvent that world and constantly refashion it. Change the shape and format of the story – unravel alternative threads of our story-telling inheritance – and a whole new world is born.

The Stone Gods incorporates potent and frequently very funny polemical elements – exposing human wastefulness, social and cultural dislocation, the absurd proscriptions of consumerist concepts of beauty and the consequences of unchecked nanny-state government. It travels from 18th-century Easter Island to a hellish future where all-pervasive technology daily struggles to extinguish the individual spirit, men and women defy the ageing process by genetically “fixing” their appearance in their mid-twenties, and household chores are done by robots in pink rubber gloves (not an unattractive idea).

In the novel’s rich dough, the horrors of environmental meltdown are leavened by an interspecies romance in which a robot seduces her handler, and a lament for the beauty of the natural world. Amid the imaginative high-jumps of sci-fi fantasy is a Blakean panegyric to nature written in lilting, beautiful, crisply modulated prose that will delight Winterson’s faithful.

Billie Crusoe (note the name) is a rebel with a cause too large for her: she is a free spirit in a society dedicated to eliminating free spirits. She lives on a farm, at a time when farms no longer exist. She reads books, although books are no longer printed, and has a knowledge of history, although historical consciousness too is being erased.

Her work is a form of public relations, but she jibs at the deceptions peddled by her employers. She has spent “all [her] life with [her] binoculars trained on the Maybe Islands, a pristine place of fantasy that is really no better than the razor-rocks of misery”. Billie is Winterson’s guide through a world in which every weakness of our own consumerist, materialist greed has been magnified to the millionth degree, and the planet, routinely abused through many centuries, teeters on the brink of destruction. Billie is banished to space, part of a mission to explore a new planet capable of supporting human life. On the journey she is seduced by a robot. She loses her world and finds love, the age-old barter.

In March 1774, Billy is a sailor on Captain Cook’s voyage to Easter Island. Shipwrecked and abandoned by his fellow seamen, he falls in love with an islander. Like Orbus, Billie Crusoe’s fictional dying planet, Easter Island is in terminal decline: the islanders have cut down all the trees to build the stone gods of the novel’s title. Now there is nowhere for birds to roost and no wood from which to make fishing boats. The islanders are starving. They will die, as the inhabitants of Orbus will die, each destroyed by worshipping false gods, whether of the religious or the consumerist variety.

In the short term, Billy learns to survive on the near-barren island, as Billie learns survival in space and both find redemption through love, like the lovers in John Donne’s The Sunne Rising, from which Winterson quotes. Their stories, of course, echo that of Robinson Crusoe, all archetypes of the isolated individual in a hostile world.

Winterson’s repeated references to Robinson Crusoe emphasise The Stone Gods’ engagement with the business of story-telling. It is impossible to read this novel without being at least subconsciously aware of the metaphor of life as a journey. In addition, echoing Crusoe’s memoirs, Winterson shows how, in struggling to record in words the world around us, we constantly reinvent the story of human creation. Billie has been adopted as a baby. Her birth heralds the start of a journey of separation from her mother. This dislocation from the reproductive and creative process mirrors the wider breakdown of the blindly technophile society in which she finds herself.

The Stone Gods is a playful but impassioned novel. Winterson cloaks her disillusionment with our political excesses in a sustained imaginative jeu d’esprit. Her writing is funny and beautiful. It cocoons the novel’s dark heart: a society that has lost its innocence – as the adopted Billie, lost her natural mother. “When I was gone, my mother came running down the street after me. Look at her, like an angel, like a light-beam, running alongside the pram. I lifted up my hands to catch her, and the light was there . . . but like angels and light she vanished.”

Buy The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson
Hamish Hamilton, £16.99; 224pp

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