Good evening.
I love this book.
Of course, everyone says that. But it’s true.
I also love this place. The Temperance Society is perhaps my favourite bar in Sydney, both for its ambience and for its name.
Indeed, it occurs to me that the two things – book and bar – have much in common. Both are small – but not too small. Intricate but not arcane. Thoughtful and gently thought-provoking. Warm. Tasty. Textured. Vivid. Fictional. Romantic. And a little bit – but not too – eccentric. A little Left Bank.
This is a book about Mars, obviously. There’s quite a lot of science involved – techie stuff about radiation shields, year-long space journeys, biodomes and so on. But it’s not really scifi (although one of the stories is called Science Fiction).
Nor is Mars, as you might expect, taken as a metaphor. A book of stories called Everyone on Mars might be expected to theme itself on ideas of othering, of alien worlds, of exile, barrenness and of the need to treasure the planet we have are, after all, fertile literary ground.
These stories are about actual Mars – real, physical Mars, colonised and inhabited.
But underneath that, what they’re really about, like all good stories, is the mystery and weirdness of the human experience and the vagaries of the human heart. In particular, the heart in exile.
In the end, I think, this is a book about exile.
The claiming of a new planet – by Elon Musk or whoever (and in Larry’s book the settlement on Mars is called ElonGate) – the claiming not just of territory, of empire, but of an entire new world – might be expected to bring a sense of expansion.
Yet here we have a pervasive sense of loss. Loss and exile.
Exile is a very interesting thing. It’s a cultural device at which the Romans, you recall, excelled. Indeed, they had three tiers of it, from relegatio to deportatio. The poet Ovid was exiled in 8AD. His was the least dreadful category. Yet even this was considered a fate worse than death.
(And the Romans were also very good, you recall, at death. Especially long, slow, excruciating death.)
Exile makes itself felt, in these 12 stories, in different ways. We variously experience exile;
• from the comforts of history,
• from the deliciousness of nature,
• from breathable, warming atmosphere and, in the end,
• exile from the planet. Our planet. The lovely, comforting, totally taken-for-granted blue (as opposed to red) planet.
But the ever-presence of exile makes these stories almost into cautionary tales.
Yellow is a story about a woman who hates the red dust. It’s orange-red, like the planet she’s on, but she considers it yellow – and it seeps into her life through every crack and crevice. There’s something very Australian in this – like Judy Davis’ character in My Brilliant Career, hating the dust and the dry and the huge red outback expanse.
This woman, heartsick for the wet blue planet, devotes herself to blue – installing blue carpet, paint, wallpaper – to create “an oceanic blue womb, a room just for them… He would fukc her so hard and so gently here…abandoned to the sweet seas, and not a grain of yellow.”
In the story Dark Matter, a West Australian man – a repressed scientist in an exploratory vehicle – gradually morphs into a rapist. “Western Australia is half of Australia,” he says. “Iron oxide… red, red as far as the eye can see. Like Mars. With air.”
The wonderfully named A Horse with Good Manners is about exile from the world of predictable decency – where Christmas is decorated shop windows, boys have toy airplanes and dream of beautiful blonde actresses. Where the rule of law made life a safe, known entity.
The Law, similarly, is about the wild west-ness of a colony that runs ahead of the rule of law, and about the existential terror of being so irretrievably far from everything that might qualify as “home.”
And there’s the story Science Fiction, about the blue slime discovered on Mars, possibly alive, and brought back to earth, where it proceeds to take over and leaves a final “thankyou for your planet” note. With this Dr Who-like scene comes the terrible, aching sense of loss.
This is the deepest, the ultimate form of homelessness. More than sleeping rough, more even than exile. Behind the pathos of that final scene one can hear Lady Bracknell’s disdainful admonishment; “it looks like carelessness.” As indeed, it is.
Oddly, because I don’t usually approve of writers writing about writers, my two favourite stories are about writers. The opening story, Writer in Residence, about a young man who yearns to be a writer. With broken heart, or perhaps to experience life more intensely, he removes his helmet, breathes to airless atmosphere and is found, a lifeless hillside corpse, smiling up at the stars.
And my ultimate fave is The Baroness, about two ageing and grumpy poets. One, now Poet Laureate, has returned from Mars without having produced the expected lyrical response. She lives with her guard-dog lover, herself a forgotten poetic genius, and is being interviewed by a young man from the Guardian. He wants to understand why nothing has been written. The Baroness
“I stood unshielded beneath the stars on an alien world. A sentient creature, not just a life form, alone… Here was The Waste Land, a place naked of life, stripped even of atmosphere, in every sense. Yet the atmosphere overwhelmed me…. Barren skies that fled before the eye…untroubled by the messiness of life…”
The final plot-twist, and the end, I will not reveal. But, like all the stories, The Baroness is rich in both haptic detail and delicate affective nuance. It is touching, funny, unpredictable and wry.
Perhaps, in the end, there is allegory here. Perhaps to be a writer – perhaps especially to be a poet, like Ovid, and above all in so unromantic a town as Sydney, like Larry – is to be an exile. The eternal other. With these stories Larry is part Ovid, part Cassandra; Raymond Carver meets Murakami meets David Suzuki.
It’s a vivid and touching book. Buy it. Read it. You’ll love it.
