Relationships and reality

Novels orbit astronomy and space travel

FAMILIES are like solar systems, suggests one of Melanie Joosten’s characters: “drift too close to another and you risk falling down (its) gravity well... stay too far away and you risk being cut loose”.

Helen was an enthusiastic and charismatic amateur astronomer; her daughter Lotte has taken it up as a profession. The odds are that she has inherited something else from the mother, who died of breast cancer: Lotte’s had the tests, but she has spent five years in South America, deliberately distant from the orbits of both bereaved father and mystified husband, and declines to find out the results.

Lotte and sound-artist Eve became housemates and best friends at university. Their stories alternate in time-frames six years apart – nominally before Chile (Lotte) and after Chile (Eve) but with much supplied in flashback. When one drifts inadvertently close to the other’s orbit the resulting displacement leads first to a long and bitter estrangement then to life-changing tragedy.

Joosten’s plotting is both wonderfully assured and stunningly unexpected: as details fall into place readers cannot but admire her chutzpah even as they respond to the complex humanity of her intimately realised characters. While her metaphors are taken from astronomy, much of Joosten’s concern in the book is with relationships, particularly parental ones.

Joosten’s intriguing overlap of astronomical allegory includes the description of a Russian experiment that puts six men into a simulated space station for 520 days.

A similar experiment is coincidentally the subject of a captivating new novel by Los Angeles writer Meg Howrey. Wanderers is an old name for the planets and Howrey’s characters have just one in their sights: Mars. American aerospace giant Prime Space is planning to put the first humans on the red planet in four years’ time. Three experienced astronauts must prove their fitness for the venture by spending 17 months in the Eidolon, a brilliantly realistic simulation, continuously monitored and tested by Prime’s observers.

The experience is described by the three astronauts in turn, interspersed with thoughts and activities of family members.

The domestic routines of space are fascinating, the confines of the ship vividly realised, the interdependence and concern of the three for one another and their joint goal depicted with unexpected tenderness.

The question of reality has already been raised: how real has their experience actually been? Howrey doesn’t vouchsafe any answers, but the experience is a beguilingly persuasive one.