You are forewarned. A short preface to Michael Chabon's Moonglow presents it as a box of narrative tricks. The narrator appears to be Chabon himself, writing about his grandfather's life as told to him in the week before the old man died. There's a 1955 reproduction of an Esquire advertisement for a recreational rocket built by his grandfather to underline the biographical nature of the book. At the same time, the writer warns us that liberties have been taken with truth "with due abandon". The writer has the best of both worlds.
The grandfather’s life is one worth telling, both in the trajectory and textures of it. As a young recruit, he tries to blow up a Washington bridge to underline his country’s lack of preparedness for the second World War. He is recruited by the OSS and pursues German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun through the ruins of Europe. He marries, goes to jail, soars, stumbles into unlikely riches. He builds model spacecraft, loses himself in dreams of rocketry, moon lore.
His marriage is at the centre of the work. Chabon has a firm grip on matters of the heart. His grandmother is a young European Jew with a child and a five-digit tattoo on her arm, a tale of reprisal and atrocity in her past. Chabon is good on marriage, what is told and left untold. His grandmother may be the least honest of the protagonists, but she has the best reasons. Her inner life is shadowed, elusive. Lies weighed against hurt.
Grandmother’s psychic companion is the Skinless Horse, an omnipresent, malevolent apparition that she strives to ignore. “When her strength failed, the Skinless Horse would be there . . . baring its square teeth, stroking its enormous bloodred penis.”
The narrator’s voice is discursive, ornamented, fast-moving. On the one hand the reader is hustled past events without being being allowed to linger. In other sequences, Chabon slows down, takes the long way round, dwells on the marginal: pre-war American suburbia, Judaic arcana, cultural bric-a-brac, djinns and dybbuks, the phantoms of early television. There are footnotes. There are digressions on the evolution of coffee cup lids.
Lonely slaves
When on point, Chabon is virtuoso. The Skinless Horse is “a shadowy, whickering thing”, humanity the “lonely slaves of gravity”. Phrases and images drift through the text, only to be overwhelmed in the blizzard of words when you want them to be fixed, to be given their due. Loveliness gets lost in the inconsequential, meaning is hidden in plain sight. This could be said to be a matter of voice, but the anchor point of the novel is history of real consequence, and the tone comes up short.
Chabon’s grandfather pursues Wernher von Braun to the Mittelwerk, the grotesque Nazi rocket factory run by slave labour. Tens of thousands of prisoners are brutalised, poisoned, worked to death. Hanged six at a time from cranes as warning to others. The horror of the work camps are given in a tone of grave reportage. Nothing else will serve. The narrator’s voice falls away. It is not apt to the depravity.
The devices of the novel are more trompe l'oeil than rigorous art brought to bear on the conjunction of truth and memory. You can disrupt the conventions of telling, but when you give your reader a glimpse through the gates of hell, raise the spectres of the damned hanged six to a gantry, you have to be sure of your ground. It can't be just a flick of the conjurer's cloak, no matter how adept. Story is an occult pursuit jealous of its purposes and more than the sum of its parts.
Despoiled landings
Von Braun was aware of the horror of the Mittelwerk. He visited there. Did nothing to stop it. He was spirited away to the United States, placed at the heart of the space programme, his crimes set aside in return for his genius. The moon landings, the great reaching out of humanity, the yearnings of the earthbound given expression, are thus despoiled.
Chabon puts it best: the ascent to the moon had been made on a ladder of bones. You are pulled up short again and again by the author’s lyric quality and insight, but the sentiment feels unearned.
The Grandfather’s downfall on return to civilian life is a beating he inflicts on his postwar boss, an outcome of post-traumatic stress disorder. He winds up in prison, witnesses the glead of light that is Sputnik from the prison roof, builds his own rocket and finds business success in model rockets.
In his latter years, widowed, he finds an end-of-life romance. There is a puzzling encounter with von Braun. You expect pay-off – if not a settling of accounts, then an acknowledgement that such accounts are due. But it seems that the idiosyncrasies of the high-functioning offset moral responsibility.
Women of gravity
Chabon’s men are masters of the unlikely, obsessives, chancers. Cruelty is part of the armoury and is never far away. His women have their feet on the ground, and Chabon takes his time with them. They have gravity where the men are often unburdened by the meaning of their own actions.
The Skinless Horse remains an elemental priapic presence. Chabon’s grandmother is “a vessel built to hold the pain of her history”. She reaches back for the source of her pain and the origins of the flayed stallion. There are memories of a tannery in childhood, of an imagistic violation. It doesn’t stop her from becoming an radio personality, or from entrusting her real story to a psychiatrist, a file which ends up in the narrators hands. Her story is credible in its very strangeness, convincing in its richness and cruelty and telling us more about truth and memory than could ever be achieved with novelistic devices.
Towards the end of the Moonglow, Chabon writes of memories "searching and testing them for their content of deceit, for the hidden presence in them of the truth". It seems like special pleading from a writer who is good enough not to need it.
Eoin McNamee is the author of the Blue Trilogy.
