By Carmel Bird
FICTION
Only the Astronauts
Ceridwen Dovey
Hamish Hamilton, $34.99
With some delight and trepidation, I learnt from the first of these five pieces of speculative realism that the character of Starman, with his nod towards David Bowie, is circling the universe in a small red car. I drive a small red car. Starman’s is a Tesla; mine is not. Starman is “something between odyssey and oddity”. He can be described as a “mannequin in a pressure suit”.
Ceridwen Dovey weaves ancient legends, history and human nature into her storytelling .
Already you can see that the mode of the collection is going to touch and tantalise the reader as it moves across time and space with a delicious flavour of sharp, ironic comedy. Writing in a confidential first person, Starman travels as “a planet unto” himself. Strap in, reader, it’s going to be a wild ride.
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You can trust Ceridwen Dovey for scientific accuracy, as you marvel at the manner in which she weaves ancient legends, history and human nature into a fabric of storytelling that can move you to laughter, tears, and fear of the future, while somehow juggling in the mix a grandeur that provides a mysterious form of hope. It is hope mingled with expectation found, once upon a time, in Ziggy Stardust.
Yet, Starman’s personal belief in a happy resolution of his narrative is clearly never going to manifest. The clue is in the pronouns that indicate the woman he has been so fondly addressing throughout the story was a shabby liar. Starman was duped. Get used to it, reader, and maybe abandon hope.
This brutal reality check punctures every story, in one way or another. The flaws are in the humans. Each tale is preceded by epigraphs – some literary, others being quotations from the history of space exploration. The second story, Requiem, is introduced with words from H.P. Lovecraft: “Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.” In this story there are sections written in languages other than English. A little challenge for the proofreader. Relax, they are nicely translated for you.
American astronaut Sally Rise.
Neil Armstrong died 12 years before the publication of this collection, and the story The Fallen Astronaut is tenderly written in the voice of his spirit as it resides inside a small sculpture on the lunar surface.
This story is a vivid education in the history of human interaction with the moon, a journey into the geography of the craters and mountains, as well as an insight into the lives of astronauts. Intimate details such as the fact that Buzz Aldrin carried communion wafers with him on the flight, and that Armstrong’s grandmother used to dry her washing by moonlight. The final gem offered at the end is the charming truth that Aldrin’s mother’s name before marriage was Moon.
As feminism quietly flickers through this male-dominated universe, there comes an epigraph from Sally Ride, the first (1983) American woman in space. The engineers ask her: “Is 100 the right number” of tampons for her five days in flight. The blind insanity of the question paves the way for the comedy of the main character in the story We, the Tamponauts being a tampon, the one secretly souvenired by Ride.
The expedition was financed by a fund “created by the tampon luxury tax”. You have heard of that before. Ninety-nine original unwanted tampons now float in space, secretly released by Ride. The comments of these tampons give the text a chance to meditate on the blunt realities of all the gruesome functions of the human body. Ride emerges as having been a most remarkable heroine.
As the spirit of Carl Sagan breathes across the collection, so the literary imagination of Italo Calvino haunts its pages. In the final story, Starman and his car are discovered by Voyager One on the tiny planet Sedna, which is inhabited by a sinister life-form named Oortian. There is a character, Plautus the tortoise, from Dovey’s earlier collection, Only the Animals, silently spying for the Oortians on the visitors. “They want to know who you believe yourself to be.” And so the reader hears the life story of the vessels Voyagers One and Two, and learns of the heroic life of Sagan, and the content and fate of the Golden Record each vessel carries.
The revelations here are prophetic and shattering. The reader’s mind is awakened and pulled into orbit as the pages turn, and the fantastic sweep of history from before to now to afterwards unfolds with fierce clarity and breezy wit.
Carmel Bird’s story collection Love Letter to Lola is published by Spineless Wonders at $24.99.
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