Luminous

This is one of those rare books which keeps you reading in a state of enchantment and awe.  

Theo Bryne is an astrobiologist and a widower, with a gifted but grief-stricken 9-year old, Robin (named for his parents’ favourite bird). Theo’s wife and Robin’s mother, Alyssa, was a lawyer campaigning for environmental rights, who died in a car accident, leaving husband and son to try to find ways of coping without her.  

The book is filled with the father-son interaction which is so tender, and yet so full of everyday, good natured negotiations that it is uplifting even when they are struggling. They are both knowledge- hungry, and Theo is always presenting a new planet to his son, who drinks in information of all kinds, and has a prodigious knowledge of the earth’s fauna and flora already. Robin is hypersensitive to any harm or hurt done to any living thing, and genuinely anguished to learn of any. Right from the outset, it is clear Robin is a most unusual child, able to focus on global issues, able to rise above himself, a very sweet-natured and determined child, exceptionally intelligent and exceptionally well-read and well-informed. 

When Theo is at his wit’s end because Robin’s behaviour is deteriorating at school and Theo does not want to subject Robin to drugs as treatment, he hits upon an experiment being done by clinical psychologist Marty Currier, an old friend of Alyssa, who works on neural imaging, which Robin could participate in and have his brain trained to control its neural activity. Since Alyssa herself had previously taken part in such tests, and Robin idolises his mother, he leaps at the chance to ‘be taught’ by the recorded results of his mother’s neural imaging. Although this plan initially works like a charm and better than Theo dared hope, the implications of involving Robin in such an experiment are far beyond what his father could have imagined. 

Theo’s admiration – or reverence, as he puts it – of Alyssa, underpins the magnitude of her loss to her family. His account of their first encounter is one of the most lyrical and romantic I have ever read anywhere:

Everything about her felt familiar, as if I’d been briefed on the local customs in advance. Her mouth puckered in permanent near-interruption, halfway between a- and be-mused. Her auburn frazzle was parted down the middle. The top of her head just reached my shoulder. She held her small frame like an athlete before the starting fun: challenges everywhere. She felt like a prediction, a thing on its way here. Compact but planetary. My favourite poet Neruda seemed to fall in love with her, too, the minute I did.

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Power’s mastery with words and originality of thought make practically every sentence in this novel luminous. 

There are so many memorable sentences in this novel, but sprinkled so generously throughout they are almost throwaways: for e.g.

The difference between fear and excitement must be only a few neurons wide.

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Many are when Theo is reflecting, or else in classic interactions between Theo and Robin: 

“What’s the ocean like, Dad? 

What was the ocean like? I couldn’t tell him. The sea was too big, and my bucket was so small. Also, it had a hole. I put my hand on the back of his calf. It seemed like my best available answer. 

Did you know the world’s corals will be dead in six more years? 

His voice was soft and his mouth sad. The world’s most spectacular partnership was coming to an end and he’d never see it.

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The scientific information in this book is delivered ever so lightly and entrancingly – the characters’ sense of amazement at all elements of the natural world and in space and beyond, is exceptionally well communicated. The storyline is holds one’s interest effortlessly, but the novel is not really all about plot, it is about the journey of Theo and Robin, utterly beguiling characters, a little family (along with the dead but ever-present Alyssa) which the reader happily falls in love with from the start and just cannot get enough of. Would that there were many many Bryne families in our world! 

Off to find more Powers books – this is a very rich seam indeed!