I was a little wary because of a review Ursula K. Le Guin had written of the book, but I put it forward anyway. It was the one we ended up picking, and I'm not sure how many people actually read it, but I have to say...yeah, I'm a little disappointed. There are paragraphs as good any anything she's written, a handful of pages where her prose gathers itself and takes flight in visceral and challenging ways. But a few bits out of 200 pages is, frankly, not great. The stuff that's the strongest are the small sections about adoption, which she's explored with huge impact in her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal. It's obviously something that pushes Winterson's buttons, and so it pushes the readers, but the rest...there's not a lot of there, there.
I think Le Guin put her finger on it - Winterson falls prey to a trap that many literary writers fall into when they delve into science fiction - that of trying to reinvent the wheel. They're not commenting on science fiction as it has been written so far, they're commenting on what they think science fiction is. To someone who has read a lot of the genre, this book isn't cutting-edge and challenging. It's clunky. Building a new world from scratch and letting your audience in on it in ways that don't show is a talent, and there are a lot of others who have done it better.
I'm being harsher than I would be to an author I don't know, because I know Winterson is better than this, and so I am disappointed. I wanted her to take her writing style and themes and bring them to a genre I dearly love. Instead, I got science fiction on square wheels, and little of what makes Winterson so amazing.
First up is her dystopia. It's a clunky dystopia, full of a society that only reacts one way to the dystopia around them, instead of being full of nuance and complexity. (Yes, there are rebels who eat caviar and drink champagne and engage in same-sex activities, but they're not three-dimensional either.) The explanation for how this world came to be what it is is cartoony, but the rest of the book doesn't camp it up as much as it would need to to make this work. This could work as a gonzo satire. Here, it is mired in commentary without much real insight.
I mean, media sexualizes young women, and some men seem to like it? Sure, easy target. All men? A little harder to sell. All women just go along with it? Even harder. Where's the queer subculture, for one? I mean, Jeanette Winterson, of all people, where's the queer subculture? (The champagne swilling girls barely count here, but they are present.) Corporations run amok trying to run all aspects of life, again, easy target. You want a dystopia, go deeper, go harder, be daring, be more complex.
She's trying something here that is interesting but doesn't quite pan out, something almost David-Mitchell-esque, but without the sure hand for genre that he's got to bolster his hopping about. The book takes place in three different times, possibly on three different planets (maybe two?) There's a hint of everything repeating, ad nauseam, and that's where there is a glimmer of something more, but it's not quite developed enough. Intriguing, not fully explored.
There's also love, forbidden passion, this time between a woman and a robo sapiens (who is also a woman, if we can assign gender in quite that way, which maybe we can and maybe we can't but it wasn't explored). It repeats. It happens over.
Oh, I wanted to love this book. I did. But it's a disappointing entry in Winterson's works, and I was vastly underwhelmed.
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