"They share a lot, astronomy and childhood. Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp. Both theorize wildly and let possibilities multiply without limits. Both are humbled every few weeks. Both operate out of ignorance. Both are mystified by time. Both are forever starting out."

The latest novel from the author of Booker shortlisted “The Overstory” and one which I feel will appeal strongly to the many fans of that book.

Whereas the etymology of Bewilder implies being lured into the wild and left astray and confused as a result, the sense of this book is of an encounter with the wild (both wilderness on earth and the wilderness of outer space) as a way to make sense of our own world and to think of the implications for how we should change the current trajectory of our society.

The novel is also a rewrite of a classic science fiction short story.

The book is set in what is best perhaps described as a very near future dystopian extrapolation of 2021 USA – a world in which an (unnamed) Trump remains in power and turning his rhetoric into hard action and where various interrelated climate, species-extinction and human-pollution crises are heading inexorably to a tipping point.

The book is narrated in first person by Theo Byrne (his surname he notes derived from Bran – the Irish for raven). After a slightly wild youth, Theo found his métier in astrobiology and the love of his life in Aly(ssa), a fiercely effective and committed environmental (particularly animal right) lobbyist and activist, with a love of birdwatching as a hobby. He thinks of her as “compact and planetary” (after a Neruda Sonnet).

"As an aside the Sonnet is Number XVI which opens (this is not quoted in the novel)
I love the handful of the earth you are.
Because of its meadows, vast as a planet,
I have no other star. You are my replica
of the multiplying universe."

And this I think is very important to the plot (and hence I am sure Power’s inclusion of it) as Theo works in the search for exoplanetary life. His specialty is around the analysis of spectroscopic signals from planets which reveal the gases in its atmosphere.

In particular he models theoretical life bearing planets and the gases they may admit (so that planetary searchers can know likely signals to search for ). In a clear nod to Aly’s birdwatching his work is referred to as the Byrne Alien Field Guide – “A taxonomic catalog of all kinds of stereoscopic signatures collated to the stages and types of possible extraterrestrial life that might make them”. For Theo the real driver is to understand if life is almost nowhere (with Earth a genuinely unique case) or almost everywhere – and to understand why some people for religious or other reasons would actually much prefer the former to be the case.

At the time of the novel, Aly has died in a car crash (seemingly avoiding an opossum, but killing herself and her unborn child) and the bereft and hapless although well-intentioned Theo is left alone to bring up their son Robin (named after his parent’s “national” bird – which they used to signify the beauty in the everyday in their marriage).

Robin is an unusual child – best I think described by Theo in a passage which I think gives a good sense of Theo and his life views as well as Robin, and is also important to the plot of the book).

"I never believed in the diagnoses the doctors settled on my son. When a condition gets three different names over as many decades, when it requires two subcategories to account for completely contradictory symptoms, when it goes from nonexistent to the country’s most commonly diagnosed childhood disorder in the course of one generation, when two different physicians want to prescribe three different medications, there’s something wrong."

"The suggestions were plentiful, including syndromes linked to the billion pounds of toxins sprayed on the country’s food supply each year. His second pediatrician was keen to put Robin “on the spectrum.” I wanted to tell the man that everyone alive on this fluke little planet was on the spectrum. That’s what a spectrum is. I wanted to tell the man that life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow. Then I wanted to punch him. I suppose there’s a name for that, too."

The book starts around Robin’s 9th birthday – with him struggling at school, Theo takes him on a camping trip in the wild – there the two stargaze, remember Aly and say and discuss her “secular prayer” (May All Sentient Beings Be Free From Suffering), play Wildlife bingo and discuss Fermi’s Paradox

"I lay in our tent that night, thinking how Robbie had spent two days worrying over the silence of a galaxy that ought to be crawling with civilizations. How could anyone protect a boy like that from his own imagination, let alone from a few carnivorous third-graders flinging shit at him? Alyssa would’ve propelled the three of us forward on her own bottomless forgiveness and bulldozer will. Without her, I was flailing."

They play a game Theo has invented as a distraction for Robin – whereby he describes an imaginary but plausible life-bearing planet, hugely different from Earth and our own definition of life, and the two travel there together in their imaginations and read a classic science fiction short story “Flowers of Algernon” (which is hugely significant for the plot of the novel – in fact effectively is the plot of the novel).

When they return home, Robin, who struggles to understand others and to control his temper, is suspended after an incident with a classmate the authorities put pressure on Theo to allow some form of chemical treatment for Robin.

Desperate to avoid this, Theo approaches an old friend of Aly’s, a scientific researcher who is experimenting with the (real-life) technique of Decoded Neurorfeedback – in simple terms training subjects to control their emotions and thinking patterns by learning how to reproduce neural activity with visual aids; and particularly by learning to reproduce the activity of other subjects with desired traits. Theo and Aly were guinea pigs at an early stage and once Robin shows an aptitude and enthusiasm for reproducing the neural patterns, the researcher uses Aly’s thought patterns to train him to deal with his condition.

Initially these inspire Robin to turn his frustration and anger at the human race’s terrible treatment the other sentient beings with which it shares a home, into effective campaigning – inpsired partly by his father (who is lobbying against government plans to cut off the funding for exoplanet researches), partly by a Greta Thunberg type character who Robin adores but mainly by his mother (who increasingly he believes is behind him in his head). The trajectory of what happens to Robin though is tragically predictable from the seed-story.

The book has the same strengths which made “The Overstory” much loved. It has the same motivations and world-view (here perhaps more of a worlds-view) as “The Overstory”, the same rather folksy setting and writing, the same embrace of the wonder of nature, the same rather cynical view of mankind, the same huge range of ideas, and the same passionate and didactic presentation of them. If there is a difference it is in the length – whereas Overstory was rather sprawling, this can feel sometimes like some ideas are picked up and discarded.

I do also feel the book has many of the weaknesses of “Overstory” also. None of Robin, Aly or Theo are particularly convincing or rounded characters – feeling perhaps a little more caricatures functioning as plot-vehicles. For a book which is fascinated with the life of other terrestrial life forms and the possibility of extra-terrestrial life and particularly how both differ fundamentally from mankind – the book is spectacularly uninterested in (or seemingly aware of) any Earth countries or human cultures other than the USA. I also did not like the anti-Christian barbs.

I was reminded too of some other novels.

Like Salman Rushdie’s “Quichotte” the protagonists read a very famous (and IRL) science fiction short story (actually its two short stories in Quichotte) and the plot of the book then explicitly follows that short story. And both books are in part a homage to science fiction and how this much-maligned genre tells us something about our world today and particularly our future.

I had strong overtones of Max Porter’s “Lanny” (maybe even Jesse Ball’s “Pew”) in the special child revealing the truths about the absurdities and cruelties of the adult world.

And the focus on absence/disappearance (here a mother, a pet dog, and of course the Fermi lack of alien contact) as a metaphor for species extinction is a strong echo of Richard Flanagan’s “Living Sea of Waking Dreams”.

Overall I found this a very impressive book.