Moondust, magic and maternal grandies
Steve Walker is swept along on the tide of Michael Chabon’s marvelous mash-up of novel and memoir.
Pulitzer-Prize-winner Michael Chabon dives into his own past yet again for his source material. Or more accurately, into his grandparents’ history. What he produces is an enigma.
Moonglow reads like a novel, albeit a fractured mish mash of real events, memories and pure fiction. Chabon deliberately adds to the confusion: the book is variously described as a ‘‘novel’’, then as a ‘‘memoir’’, then as a ‘‘pack of lies’’. In some sense, however, its genre is only relevant to cataloguing librarians.
That’s because for the reader, Moonglow is pure delight. Chabon has no care for the restraints of linear plot, or careful characterisation. The novel is like a giant washing machine, tumbling together stray elements of a rich past, sprucing them up and leaving them fresh yet still recognisable.
Chabon’s tale focuses on the lives of his two maternal grandparents, who remain unnamed until the end. His larger-than-life grandfather tells the writer, late in his days, to ‘‘write it all down’’. He wants the whole thing in ‘‘chronological order’’ but Chabon has other plans.
Grandfather has run circuses and brothels, searched the ruins of Nazi Germany for the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who was later to take Man to the moon, and undergone a jail sentence for nearly killing his employer. He ends his life in a retirement village in Florida, near his beloved Cape Canaveral, searching for a snake and a cat gone feral.
A young Chabon is utterly entranced by his fiery grandfather’s exploits, his ‘‘patrimony of secrets’’, not the least because they evidence a man of high principles.
Grandfather is not one to allow an injustice to go unpunished, regardless of personal cost.
Grandmother is very different. She appears to have emerged from the troubles of war-torn Europe intact. A ‘‘dreamy, romantic’’, magical woman, with puppets, tarot cards and scary stories, she too has a secret, but one that is far more sinister than her husband’s. Yet she is also stoic, a ‘‘tough cookie’’.
Chabon’s narrative is, by turns, fantastical, fast and funny. He commits the memoirist’s great sin of quoting conversations from long ago, which he cannot have possibly known about, since they happened many years before his birth. He weaves together various narrative threads – his grandfather’s quest for von Braun, the escaped cat, his grandmother’s loosening sanity, their first encounter and subsequent lovemaking.
Logical or chronological links are unnecessary.
There is a wry, Jewish humour woven throughout. A wartime friend ‘‘often resorted to false cheeriness in the bleak hours between dusk and inebriation’’. Chabon’s characteristically inventive style effortlessly blends the fantastic with the mundane, the wry with the deeply serious.
If at times the tumbling narrative flow leaves you gasping for space to breathe and take stock, don’t bother. Just allow yourself to be swept along: the ride will be worthwhile, the rewards of perseverance great.