The cover design.
The blurb by Colum McCann. There was no way I was not reading this
book. And sometimes that kind of prejudice will lead you into a piece
of literary heaven.
It is rare to read
as deeply moving a novel as this. Some books just give you a certain
feeling. Even though the book might be heartbreaking, the feeling it
gives you is not a bad one. I liked being in the book, being a part
of the events. The language so poetic, so grand, I just wanted to
reread the sentences over and over.
Aged ten, Duncan
“wakes” to life, with no recollection of his life spent at the
catholic orphanage in the Mid-West. His insomniac nights are spent
freezing next to the fireplace in the company of Father Tobin, or
curled up frozen on his bed with the static of a broken radio to
console him. Through the static Duncan hears the voices of the
astronauts who he believes never made it back to earth. Along with
his father, mother and the angels, they’re all there in heaven.
When Duncan’s
mother Maggie comes to reclaim him, Duncan’s world is turned upside
down. As his only memento of the orphanage, Duncan brings the broken
radio along to his new life in the San Francisco sun. His mother
tells him that she only left him at the orphanage when he was six,
and she’s surprised he doesn’t remember his childhood with her.
The pictures in her room trigger no recollection in Duncan. As Duncan
settles into his new life, the blank where his father should have
been eats at him. But his mother refuses to tell him who, or where,
his father is.
Maggie has
heartbreaks of her own. She works at the cancer ward, seeing dying
patients every day. One night a week she sings at the local pub, with
a voice that was once the best voice of her generation, but is now
all but gone. Often a bottle accompanies her to bed, sometimes
alongside her childhood friend Joshua, a Vietnam war veteran with his
own demons.
Duncan loves Joshua,
even though Maggie tells him Joshua was never the same after the war.
Joshua sees angels and indulges Duncan’s ideas about the dead
astronauts. In his mothers’ absence, Joshua becomes a pillar in
Duncan’s life, and for a while the threesome play at being a happy
family.
Imagination and
stories are important motifs in the novel. Father Tobin tells Duncan
“a” story of how Duncan came to the orphanage. For lack of the
“real” story, he tells him “a” story. And Duncan reflects:
“…then there are words, the rounded, fluid, liquid feel of them
pouring from his mouth and creating
something out of nothing – he trusts
in their precision and in the objects they create. He trusts in their
imperviousness, and, once uttered, their
irrevocable destiny” (p.22). Duncan
often sees things he cannot possibly see – the astronauts, his
mother’s face in the moon, Joshua in the tunnels where he works. As
a parallel, Joshua’s angel spotting seem to suggest that this is a
coping mechanism, but one which might not necessarily healthy.
Echoing Buzz
Aldrin’s words and then book Magnificent
Desolation, some of the themes in the
novel are already hinted at in the title. Duncan is obsessed with the
moon landing. He seems to connect the absence of his father to the
idea that Buzz Aldrin and Armstrong never returned to earth. And
there is a sense that he himself can never return “home” to the
orphanage.
This is a novel
about grief, loneliness, hopelessness. About magnificent desolation.
In the course of reading the novel we get to experience the landscape
of that desolation, which stretches on and on and on. And Duncan
cannot change it.
This Magnificent
Desolation is truly poetic, truly
grand, truly magnificent. And absolutely heartbreaking, as one of my
customers said.
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