The Stone Gods
Jeanette Winterson
Hamish Hamilton, $A32.95, October 2007
Reviewed by Malcolm Tattersall, November 2007
The cover may be restrained but The Stone Gods is as zany, in part, as anything Douglas Adams ever wrote. It is also sweetly romantic, raunchy and searingly polemical Ð The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy meets Rubyfruit Jungle and Collapse.
It is a love story replayed against our remote past and our future. Billie Crusoe is female in two of her incarnations, and a sailor marooned on Easter Island in the third; her beloved is sometimes a robot. In one incident in the post-apocalyptic near future, bikie vigilantes rescue Billie from corporate thugs disguised as Japanese tourists. The confrontation escalates, and a few hours later the lesbian vegan rock band are handing out assault rifles.
It is also a savage attack on the myopic corporatism that insists on business as usual while the global environment goes into toxic shock.
In a word: pyrotechnic.Created 2 May 2008
