Sputnik Caledonia
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| Sputnik Caledonia | |
| Author | Andrew Crumey |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Sara Fanelli |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Picador |
| Publication date | 2008 |
| Media type | Hardback, paperback |
| Pages | 553 (paperback) |
| ISBN | 978-0330448413 (hardback), 978-0330447027 (paperback) |
Sputnik Caledonia (2008) is a novel by Andrew Crumey, for which he won the Northern Rock Foundation Writer’s Award. It depicts a Scottish boy who longs to be a spaceman, is transported to a parallel communist Scotland where he takes part in a space mission to a black hole, and returns to the real world in middle age, possibly as a ghost. The novel is in three “Books”, with the central one (set in the alternate world) being longest, predominantly serious in tone, while the outer sections are shorter and more humorous. The title refers to the Russian Sputnik program and the alternative name for Scotland, Caledonia, suggesting the idea of Scotland as a satellite state of the Soviet Union.
[edit] Plot
- Book One
Robbie Coyle, nine years old at the start of the book, lives in Kenzie in Scotland’s central belt in the early 1970s. His father Joe is a welder in a Clydebank factory, a trade union activist and ardent socialist; his strong views dominate the household, which also contains Joe's wife Anne and daughter Janet. Inspired by the Apollo program, Robbie dreams of going into space; but because of his father’s anti-American, pro-Soviet views, Robbie wants to be a cosmonaut rather than astronaut. He tries to teach himself Russian, and makes a Halloween costume in the form of a spacesuit.
As Robbie grows and attends secondary school, he encounters science teacher Mr Tulloch, who becomes a new role model for him, and another teacher, David Luss, who is antagonistic to Tulloch.
On his bedroom radio, Robbie discovers an Eastern European station called Voice of the Red Star. He imagines it to be a signal from another planet, and comes to believe he is in telepathic contact with it. He goes to an abandoned country estate near Kenzie, due to become a military base, and finds a mysterious pile of glass marbles which he supposes to have come from a visiting spaceship. He attends a church-hall dance where he meets a slightly older girl named Dorothy, who urges on him the importance of Christian faith, and with whom he has his first kiss. Communicating with the Red Star, Robbie begs to be taken to another world where he and Dorothy can be adult lovers together. The voice says his wish will be granted, but he must be given a completely new life and memory.
- Book Two
Nineteen-year-old Robert Coyle lives in the British Democratic Republic – a Communist state founded after the overthrow of Nazi occupation in the “Great Patriotic War” – and has arrived at a secret base in Scotland, the Installation, to take part in a space mission led by German-born Professor Kaupff. A strange new object has been detected in the solar system, believed to be a black hole (or “frozen star”, in Soviet terminology), and the volunteers are to explore it.
Robert is quickly fascinated by Rosalind, Kaupff’s young assistant, who escorts the volunteers on a tour of the Installation – a complete closed town. Robert is billeted with the Franks – Arthur, Dorothy and daughter Miriam – who become his surrogate family, and bear a resemblance to the family seen in Book One. Kaupff, likewise, is a transformation of Tulloch, and the Installation is a mirror-image of Kenzie.
Robert is soon singled out as favourite by Kaupff, who gives him a book to read, "Rocket To The Stars" (seen in Book One), and explains that a space rocket cannot be launched from Scotland, which is too northerly. Kaupff walks in the grounds with Robert and they are disturbed by Commissioner Davis, the sinister Party officer (image of the teacher David Luss in Book One) who is eavesdropping and accuses Kaupff of sexual impropriety.
When training begins, Rosalind makes the volunteers do yoga, saying their mission is to be mental as much as physical. Kaupff lectures them on general relativity, and describes his new theory of “scalar waves”. It gradually becomes apparent that the mission involves telepathic detection of these waves, believed to emanate from the black hole, which Kaupff dubs the Red Star. Advocating a holistic (or as Kaupff puts it, dialectic) approach to the problem, Kaupff has invited a distinguished novelist, Brian Willoughby, to join the team. In the training centre (which resembles a university), Robert meets Dora, a young woman working as a caterer, who is in fact a prisoner.
Kaupff invites the team to an astronomical observing session, and lectures them on Kant and Goethe. Davis and Willoughby are sceptical of Kaupff’s “eclecticism”; Willoughby and Rosalind become intimate, arousing Robert’s jealousy. Davis informs Robert that he must keep watch on Kaupff, who is suspected of having been involved in the death of the Franks’ infant son years earlier. Together with his fellow volunteers Forsyth and Harvey, Robert goes to the Blue Cat, a night spot that proves to be a brothel where Dora is forced to work as a prostitute. Davis and Willoughby join them; Davis privately repeats his demands for information on Kaupff, and offers Robert any woman he wants: he chooses Dora. It is at this point, seeing the slavery of the women, that Robert awakens to the inhumanity of the regime and decides to resist it.
Soon afterwards he is abducted by subversives who turn out to be Miriam Frank and her friends. They are covert Christians and believe that the approaching black hole is the second coming of Christ. Robert thinks them mad, and decides not to betray them. But when he tells Kaupff about the attack, Kaupff insists that they are terrorists and must be arrested. Robert warns Kaupff that he is the one who faces arrest, but Kaupff dismisses this as nonsense.
Robert is subjected to a bizarre experiment by Rosalind, supposed to enhance the mental reception of scalar waves through sexual arousal. In a lecture to the mission team, Kaupff finally reveals the full extent of the plan. He believes that the black hole represents the highest state of astrophysical evolution – and hence must be alive and conscious. Willoughby and Davis denounce him and he is relieved of his duties; Davis reveals that the planned mission would have resulted in Robert’s certain death.
With the mission in disarray, Robert goes to find Dora, but she rejects him. Davis finds him and promises great rewards for his part in Kaupff’s downfall. Inadvertently foiling a rebellion, Robert betrays those he loves – Dora and Kaupff – but saves Miriam, whom he despises. The Book ends with his participation in a redesigned mission that will nevertheless kill him, and once more he hears the voice of the Red Star, telling him, “Your life is over… but not your story.”
- Book Three
In a present-day recognisable reality, Joe and Anne Coyle are pensioners. Robbie died of cancer aged nineteen, and Janet has moved away to join a commune, adopting a new name and severing contact. The story of Joe and Anne alternates with that of “the kid” a runaway 13-year-old obsessed with science fiction stories such as Doctor Who, and with the idea that “in an infinite universe everything is possible”. The kid meets a middle aged man (“the stranger”) who claims to be a spaceman on a mission.
Through Joe’s reminiscences we learn his theory that the mysterious marble was some kind of radioactive waste which caused Robbie’s brain tumour. The first symptoms were the voices he heard; eventually Robbie had delusions about non-existent people such as “Dora”. Joe meets the stranger and finds him familiar but unsettling.
The kid meets a girl named Jodie, who turns out to be the daughter of Dorothy in Book One. Just as Dorothy was named from The Wizard Of Oz, Jodie is named after the lead actor in Contact (film). The kid tells Jodie about the stranger and she watches as he meets with him again. The stranger gives the kid a counterfeit cash card and instructs him to withdraw money from an ATM and bring it back, “as a test”. The kid does as he says; Jodie says he should have nothing more to do with him, but the kid insists he wants to join the stranger’s mission.
The stranger takes the kid to a hotel just outside Kenzie, on the site of the former military base which was decommissioned after the Cold War. He gives his name as Robert Coyle, and tells the kid his name for the mission is Felix, and that he is to pose as Coyle’s son. The hotel (The Lodge) clearly mirrors the mansion inhabited by Kaupff in Book Two.
The stranger explains to the kid that they are to go to the airport next morning: the stranger will catch a plane, and when it reaches a certain altitude he will “go home”. The kid understands it to be a terrorist mission; he escapes from the stranger and takes refuge in another part of the hotel, where he finds himself in a gathering attended by David (the teacher from Book One, now a politician), and women named Rosalind and Miriam (the latter possibly being Janet). The kid flees the hotel, and a fatal meeting with Joe on the way back to Kenzie brings the action to its climax. The novel ends next morning as the plane, carrying the stranger, is seen ascending overhead.
