space

Bewilderment, by Richard Powers

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Astrobiologist Theo Byrn searches for life in the universe. Even as a child he imagined different planets, sketching out their topography, geology and biology. Now he models potential varieties of planets, based on the latest research, and what sorts of life might be expected to develop there. His models will be used when—if—those life forms are discovered or make contact with us.

But it is as a father that we most get to know Theo. His 9-year-old son Robin is brilliant in his own way, but has trouble with social expectations and is bullied in school. When he’s interested in something, he learns everything about it, but when he isn’t, he stops paying attention.

Theo doesn’t want Robin medicated. He can’t bear the idea of blunting this extraordinary child’s mind to make him fit better into school. To do so would also betray the boy’s mother Alyssa who’d insisted that Robin be allowed to develop his capabilities. An animal rights activist, she had been killed two years earlier when she swerved to avoid hitting an opossum. Robin shares his mother’s passion for trying to save creatures from extinction.

Robin’s passion is one of the joys of the book; the various ways it manifests are astonishing and thought-provoking. Another joy comes from the planets that Theo describes for his son as bedtime stories and sometimes directly for the reader. Such imagination!

What does it mean to raise an exceptional child? Does it mean ignoring all the science? All the social rules? All the well-meaning teachers? Would I feel as though I’d failed my child? Parental guilt is bottomless. And anyway how many ways are there to be exceptional? The kind of intelligence classrooms recognize? Or creativity that looks beyond what is to what could be? Or a sensitivity that is tuned beyond what most of us understand?

I have struggled this with this myself. As a parent you don’t want to crush what is special about your child, yet at the same time you don’t want them to be excluded from the community around them. Where is the balance?

Perhaps your male child has a sweetness that is not acceptable in our world. Perhaps your girl child has a vulnerability that scares you out of your wits. What are the consequences for trying to be true to your child and let them develop as they are wired to do? How much danger are you putting them in?

Don’t we need them? These amazing young people who are in touch with ideas and proposals that we never even imagined? These young people who will be our doctors and lawyers and friends?

Theo says, “I wanted to tell the man that life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow.” But Theo also says, “No doctor can diagnose my son better than I can.” Such contradictions are human, aren’t they? I spend a lot of time with a nine-year-old these days, so Robin, while also contradictory, seems well-drawn to me. He veers between astonishingly mature comments and sentimental platitudes that he’s just discovered. He can throw destructive tantrums or spend hours creating a detailed work of art.

One of my library’s patrons wrote on the comment form for this book that there was so much bad news already that they didn’t need more, no matter how much they liked his previous book The Overstory. True, this 2021 novel takes the then-current political situation farther and presciently shows the kind of destruction of the country’s science infrastructure and capabilities that actually occurred four years later. Meanwhile, the climate crisis worsens every month while corrupt politicians bloviate about bathrooms.

Of course I share Robin’s heartbroken despair at the species that are going extinct and the natural places that are being destroyed. While I am delighted by the many and detailed worlds that Theo comes up with, they will not save us. Only we can do that.

Have you read another book by Richard Powers? What did you think of it?

The Secret Staircase, by Jill Barklem

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The children in my life love this story, part of the Brambly Hedge series. They are fascinated by the idea of a hidden stair and rooms that have long been locked up. Who isn’t? Surely I wasn’t the only child who went around tapping on walls and measuring the inside and outside of houses, hoping to find a secret passage or cobweb-laden room that no one remembered was there.

In this story, young Wilfred arrives at the Old Oak Palace along with Mr. Apple and the other children to prepare for that night’s big midwinter’s eve celebration. Lord Woodmouse and his daughter Primrose welcome them, and the two children go off to find costumes and to practice the poem they are to recite.

With all the bustling preparations Wilfred and Primrose have trouble finding a quiet place to practice until they enter a crowded storeroom at the end of a passage. However, they get distracted by all the things around them. Primrose explores a dresser and finds a small key in a drawer. Wilfred pulls at a green curtain that reveals a locked door hidden behind it. To their delight, Primrose’s key opens it.

Thus begins their adventure, all the more beguiling because of Barklem’s illustration of a secret stairway within the huge oak tree.

Why are we so drawn to hidden passages, mysterious rooms, and secret gardens? Though I was a practical child, I liked to imagine there was more to the world than the bare bones I could see, hear and touch. It could be a legend, a family story, or a bit of history about a place. It could even be the possibility that a dense forsythia bush hid a unicorn.

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about adding what he called shimmer to his stories. He said that creating histories and legends around ordinary objects made them more real by adding the dimension of time—hence all his references in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings to certain legends and songs. Sketching in those shimmering ghosts of the past can deepen the texture of the world in any story.

I’ve always been fascinated by houses anyway. My walk to and from school took me past a variety of houses large and small. I’d try to guess the layout of the bedrooms from what I could see of the windows and decide which room I would want to have. I used one of my favorites as the cover for my poetry collection Terrarium.

Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space says:

. . . if the house is a bit elaborate, if It has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams . . . In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for.

Another reason to search for these hidden spaces is the thrill of entering a place where no one has been for years and years. Or perhaps ever: my brother, a lifelong caver, was part of the first team to explore Lechuguilla when it was discovered in New Mexico. He described for me that feeling of being the first person ever to step into a particular chamber.

While that’s not something I’ll probably ever experience, I like the idea of including a little bit of mystery in stories by the discovery of some hidden place. Adding shimmer to the place by giving it a history or legend would deepen its appeal. Perhaps readers would add their own shimmer as they remember being young and looking for a disguised door that might hide a secret staircase.

Did you ever search for hidden passages or secret spaces when you were young?

Orbital, by Samantha Harvey

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Put six people from five countries into the International Space Station orbiting Earth and leave them there for several years. Now write about a single day, which encompasses sixteen orbits, so sixteen sunrises, sixteen sunsets. I immediately imagined around a dozen different stories that could come out of this premise.

I never imagined Samantha Harvey’s Orbital.

I am stunned by the gorgeous language. When Chie sees the islands of her native Japan, they look like “a trail of drying footprints. Her country is a ghost haunting the water.”

When Roman glances out a window in passing, “the view is at first indistinct. It takes a moment to orientate. An expanse of wintry nothingness, pearly cloud cover, and then the familiar gleam of ice sheets sloping off the Antarctic Circle. Starboard, the seven sisters audaciously bright.”

From space, borders and boundaries blur. Within their small metallic bubble, we see the astronauts and cosmonauts—from Britain, the U.S., Japan, Italy, and two from Russia—sometimes individually and sometimes as a group as they go about their days. They exercise to preserve their legs and hearts, pursue their scientific experiments, manage the effects of weightlessness.

They have moments of awe—wonder and terror—at the boundless space around them. “Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it is stalking through their quarters.” Sometimes they feel themselves remote from those on the planet below them, unable to intervene in looming catastrophes. At other times, they are affected by news from home and memories. Shaun recalls a high school lesson about the Velázquez painting Las Meninas and the shifting possibilities of subject and perspective. A postcard of the painting is one of the things he brought with him.

Haley Larsen recently wrote on Substack about the use of free indirect narration. When we talk about different points of view, we’re describing different degrees of narrative distance from the characters. For example, first person PoV is the most intimate, providing access to the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings, while third person is sometimes compared to a camera over the protagonist’s shoulder with no access to thoughts or feelings. Free indirect narration is when the author’s lens moves in and out, between a narrow focus on one character and a wider zoom.

Winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, Orbital is a brilliant example of this narrative technique. Not only does the author zoom from all-seeing narrator to the group aboard the space station to a single astronaut/cosmonaut, but through the six people we see the earth as a whole, individual places (e.g., the pyramids), a family, a single person on earth. That movement in and out IS the story’s movement. Amazing.

In a recent blog post, author and teacher C.S. Lakin writes, “I was reading A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, and I was struck by a passage that didn’t filter the world through the characters’ eyes but used a shared experience to reveal their reality.” That shared experience was hunger. She goes on to say, “[T]aking the perspective of a singular force, such as hunger, can be a powerful way to reveal not just one character’s experience but the life of an entire community.”

The community in Orbital is the six people aboard the space station. To me, though, they are an example of synecdoche, where a part of something is used to signify the whole. They are all of us, riding on this increasingly fragile planet.

I loved the book and, finishing it, immediately started again. I continue to return to it. I could write a whole essay about each tiny part. However, not everyone in my book club enjoyed it. While this is a novel, you won’t find much in the way of plot. It is more a collection of poetry, of meditations about humans and our Earth, embodied in six memorable people and their remarkable experiences.

Have you read a novel that simply astounded you?