We open with Theo, our narrator, and Robin, his son, looking at the night sky through a telescope. ‘Darkness this good was hard to come by,’ Theo tells us. He calls Robin ‘my sad, singular, newly turning nine-year-old, in trouble with this world’.
We’re in the American Midwest, where Theo is a nerdy computer scientist — a data engineer whose professional world consists of looking for life on other planets. Robin, we soon see, might have ADHD. He’s brilliant, but unpredictable and testy. Alyssa, Theo’s wife and Robin’s mother, a former animal rights activist, is dead. Apart from Theo’s not-quite-friend Martin, an extreme super-geek of a neuroscientist, these are our main characters.
Powers’s previous novel, The Over-story, was about the idea that trees can communicate with each other, and the fact that most humans don’t know or care about this. It won the Pulitzer prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker. Barack Obama loved it. With this novel, which has also been shortlisted for the Booker, I was expecting painful truths about humans trashing the environment — and it’s what we get, in spades. Powers is extremely good at creating a very specific emotion in the reader: a potent mix of sadness and guilt. He’s also a wizard when it comes to telling us about trees, rivers, insects and birds.
Anyway, Theo takes the troubled Robin on a camping trip in the Smoky Mountains, where they swim in a freezing, turbulent creek. Don’t do it, I kept thinking. But Theo loves the wilderness; on the way back, he says the sight of the first road ‘crushed me’. Later, father and son watch videos of Alyssa, and keep picking away at the question: if there is intelligent life on other planets, why have they not contacted us? As we shall see, there are two worrying answers to this.
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