Mothers and Daughters on the Circle Line The Stone Gods, by Jeanette Winterson, The Cleft, by Doris Lessing, and The Unit, by Ninni Holmqvist, reviewed by Julie Phillips. Published in Dutch translation in Trouw, Amsterdam, November 17, 2007.
 Cormac McCarthy, in “The Road,” writes about the last man on earth. Margaret Atwood, in “Oryx and Crake,” does too. Michael Cunningham populates New York with four-foot-tall lizard people in “Specimen Days.” Michael Chabon writes about a Jewish state in Alaska. And now Jeanette Winterson is telling tales of robot love and Doris Lessing has won the Nobel Prize.
Almost any serious literary writer with a little fantasy is liable, at one time or another, to stray into genre territory. To scorn science fiction for its supposed lack of literary qualities is to ignore what it can do better than any other literature: explore alternatives, rethink relationships. Women especially need it. Women have reasons to want political change, while in space there’s plenty of room to start over.
That’s the hope offered by Jeanette Winterson’s witty, romantic, high-energy novel “The Stone Gods.” Winterson has said she wanted to write her first political book, about global warming, ecological depletion, and state repression. I doubt that such a book will save the world (aren't Winterson's readers already on her side?) but the anger seems to have revived Winterson’s own depleted writing. Or maybe it was the imaginative space. Winterson uses that freely, as the book moves between the near future, the 18th century, and something that may have happened 65 million years in the past.
Within that space, big ideas echo: love, journey and return, paradise lost. The first part of the book takes place on a virgin planet accidentally—oops—damaged by its first human inhabitants. In the second part, a sailor stranded on Easter Island in 1774 witnesses the laying waste of that land in honor of its gods. In the third, we see England after World War 3 (which was started by Iranian nuclear strike). In each part, our guide is Billy, or Billie, Crusoe, who reappears as a seaman, a female bureaucrat, a reluctant astronaut. In every part he/she is a castaway, and is rescued by love.
Winterson dresses her usual story of love and longing in new high-tech metaphors: a distant beacon, a failing battery, or a message from a lost civilization, pinging between earth and the moon. Billie recalls how she was given up as an infant for adoption. But she remains coded for her mother’s body.
My mother came home from the mill and made a detour round the gasworks to the Adoption Society. She found a foothold in the back wall and hauled herself up [to] look in through the window…She stood like a lighthouse, like a pulsar, and I was a radio telescope that caught the signal…I know you’re there, I know where you are, I can track you because we are the same stuff.
The robot Spike, Billie’s lover, says “Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was.” Billie adds, “The opposite of loneliness isn’t company, it’s return. A place to return.” Some of the story is taken from a manuscript found on London’s Circle Line.
By the last section, the closest we come to a virgin land is Wreck City, a post-Apocalyptic shanty town of Doc Martens-wearing punks surviving on scavenged champagne, sardines and white leather furniture. Here Billie Crusoe finally meets her Friday: a bartender who used to work for the World Bank. Meanwhile Spike, the robot last seen tragically casting off her body in part one, returns to comic effect as a head who escapes before her body is finished. She is promptly seduced into going down on a teenage rock chick named Nebraska. Take that, “Blade Runner.”
At first Winterson doesn’t quite have the hang of her mix of science fiction and romance, so that she deploys too many clichés about robot parking cops and giant corporations taking over the world. (Not that they’re not.) But by the end, “The Stone Gods” has become deeply comic and philosophically profound. A certain lack of seriousness about Literature has allowed Winterson to produce one of her most serious and enjoyable books.
If any literary writer belongs in science fiction, it’s Doris Lessing, with her contrarian political inquiry into gender, marriage, and the state. Her ideas seem almost too big to be explored without resorting to the imaginary. (And besides, as one critic asked, what takes more fantasy, writing a science fiction novel or, as Lessing did, remaining a Communist until 1957?) Starting in 1979, Lessing published “Canopus in Argos: Archives,” five ambitious books which depict a series of social experiments, on various planets, testing humans’ capacity for moral and spiritual advancement. Impressive in their intelligence and strangeness, they show how daring the Nobel committee’s choice for Lessing really is.
Her new novel, however, is a fable, a dangerous genre for a writer, like Lessing, who doesn’t easily acknowledge her emotions and is liable to think things behind her own back. “The Cleft” is about the origin of gender differences in a prehistoric past. An all-female colony lives contentedly by the sea near a stone chasm called, heavy-handedly, the Cleft. Then one day they start giving birth to infant males. Confronted with the boys’ strange anatomy, they develop a new self-awareness. Suddenly their minds are “full of like, unlike; same, other;—full of differences.” Guess what? The men hunt and explore. The women nag and keep house. Behind this nonsense, one senses several layers of double negatives—“if you believe this then I’ll believe that”—culminating in the settling of some old score with women in general or Lessing’s mother in particular.
“The Unit” (“Enhet”), by Swedish writer Ninni Holmqvist, seems at first like a conventional, literary “women’s book.” But its science fiction premise makes it a disturbing novel with a frightening aftertaste. In Holmqvist’s near-future Sweden, women over 50 and men over 60 who are not married, have no children, and don’t perform essential work are declared superfluous. They are sent to the Unit, a facility where they are comfortably housed, well fed, and used as guinea pigs in medical experiments until, within a few years, they must donate all their organs for the benefit of the “essentials.”
This recalls Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go,” in which infants are cloned and raised to adulthood to become organ donors. But here Holmqvist lays her finger on the real fear that as one grows older, without having built strong attachments or achieved prominence—a writer, say, like Holmqvist, who first published in her thirties, has a few books to her credit, but probably can’t support herself through her work—one will be discarded. The residents of the Unit are the people who passed up earning money and having children in favor of creativity and independence. The narrator, the writer Dorrit, recalls her mother saying, “Watch out. Don’t ever depend on a man’s support—not financially, not intellectually, not emotionally. Don’t get caught in that trap!” Yet in the face of death the inhabitants of the ironically named Unit turn to caring for each other and find themselves building stronger bonds than they have ever had. Many of them, including Dorrit, fall in love.
You want them, then, to band together and make their escape. But they can’t. They have learned to be independent but never to effect change. At times the book is maddening in its triviality—in the midst of this horror, Dorrit is able to go on about her lunch, her trips to the sauna, her feelings toward her fellow patients. And yet with this mundane detail the book is making the point that the “superfluous” have lost the ability to act in their own lives. They have gained their soul and lost the world.
In many of these incursions from “outside” into the world of genre, there’s a similar fatalism. It’s possible that literary writers are turning to fantasy worlds, not only in order to imagine social change, but as a response to our incapacity to effect change in the real world. Behind the Iron Curtain, science fiction was a way for literary authors such as Stanislaw Lem (“Solaris”) to disguise their ideas from censors. But in the West, where no one seems to be listening at all, maybe the best we can manage is a samizdat of dreams.
The Mother-Daughter Bond
Along with their use of science fiction, one thing Jeanette Winterson (UK, 1959), Ninni Holmqvist (Sweden, 1958), and Doris Lessing (Persia, 1919, raised in Rhodesia) all have in common is a concern with maternal relationships. In “The Stone Gods,” an infant daughter longs for her mother, an autobiographical reference: Winterson herself was given up as a baby for adoption. In Holmqvist’s book, a “superfluous” woman who, after all hope seems lost, gives birth to a daughter is forced to relinquish her to a mother who is said to deserve her more.
One of Lessing’s first experiments in science fiction was “Memoirs of a Survivor” (1974), which takes place inside a house at the end of civilization. Inside the house a series of psychological fantasies unfolds that refers to Lessing’s own troubled family history, including her emotional rejection by her mother and her abandonment of two of her own children before she moved from Rhodesia to London in 1949. This may be one reason Winterson and Lessing in particular chose science fiction. Genre can allow a writer to handle feelings that are so powerful and frightening that they can’t be examined by conventional means. And the mother-daughter relationship can feel as big, unexplored, and full of hazards as space itself.
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