“At first glance, the laboratory-gowned scientist seemed to be a perfect servant of nothing but truth. At first glance, one was convinced that nothing but truth could please him as he beamed at his test tube. At first glance, one thought that he was as much above the beastly concerns of mankind as the harmoniums in the caves of Mercury. There, at first glance, was a young man without vanity, without lust – and one accepted at its face value the title Salo had engraved on the statue, Discovery of Atomic Power.
And then one perceived that the young truth-seeker had a shocking erection.”
Empathy and cynicism meet and meld in The Sirens of Titan, which is Kurt Vonnegut’s second novel but the one in which he truly found his voice. The satire is often unbearably brutal and there are moments of powerful grace and humanity. Though not a solipsistic writer, Vonnegut’s inner conflict is never concealed. He sees life as futile and human beings as horribly flawed, but at the same time he finds so much redemption in the smallest instances of sharing and kindness between any two people. It’s a philosophical battle that never quite gets settled in his greatest books, which is what makes them so potent. An eccentric millionaire, Winston Niles Rumfoord, builds a spaceship and blasts off with his dog to explore the universe, getting sucked into some kind of wormhole or vortex that transforms him into a multi-dimensional being who can see the future, at least well enough to seem omniscient to most mortals, allowing him to remake society in his image, orchestrate interplanetary wars, and unify the world under a new religion called The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, the sole tenet of which is that all events are complete accidents, not the will of the Almighty. Meanwhile, another rich man, Malachi Constant, lives a completely frivolous life and becomes a pawn in Rumfoord’s agenda to demonstrate the absence of divine justice in the cosmos. And just when we think that Rumfoord is essentially a demigod, we find that he is not only at the mercy of natural forces but also of an alien race known as the Tralfamadorians, who have manipulated human history for no other reason than to make them able to produce and deliver a replacement spaceship part for one of their messenger robots stranded on Titan, a task that takes hundreds of thousands of years. (One other point of interest about the book is that it describes a future society where citizens accept handicaps to minimize any kind of physical or intellectual advantages they may have other others, a concept that will become the main premise of Vonnegut’s later famous story “Harrison Bergeron.”) The plot is not dependent on twists and turns, but there are several that bowled me over. More than the story, though, are various isolated scenes and subplots that really surprised and moved me. The Tralfamadorian robot, Salo, alone for millennia, has developed compassion and a profound sense of loneliness. Salo is crestfallen to find that Rumfoord, the only other intelligent being on the Saturn moon, has no interest in his friendship and only resents him as a fellow tool of the Tralfamadorians. This leads to Salo committing suicide by disassembling himself by a lakeshore. Chrono, the estranged son of Constant, is a surly brat on Earth but after being on Titan for many years, he goes feral and leaves his family to live with the native bluebird flocks, wearing feathers and learning their language, and even building votive structures in their honor all over the landscape. Near the end of his life, the repentant Constant undertakes cleaning and maintaining these shrines as a means of bonding with his son. Most striking of all, for me, is the tale of Unk and Boaz marooned in the deep catacombs of Mercury, (thereby – by Rumfoord’s design – surviving the disastrous Mars-Earth war). There is a native species in these caverns called ‘harmoniums,’ creatures that have no higher functions or thoughts beyond existing and who are fueled by vibrations. Dazzled by their simple beauty and the music they produce, Boaz bonds with the harmoniums, letting them feed on his own pulse, and ultimately chooses to remain alone with them on Mercury rather than escape with Unk. Whether foolish or heroic, or both, the willingness of characters to risk self-destruction to experience a bit of genuine warmth, kindness or tranquility is a phenomenon that Vonnegut returns to often. As he writes in The Sirens of Titan, “It was all so sad. But it was all so beautiful, too.”
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