It’s a strange, melancholy feeling to read a novel that exactly captures the multi-layered tensions and cross-pressures of the current world. One reads to escape, but it’s only a matter of time before the dystopian world bleeds into the pages of the novel. After all, there is a thin membrane between the self and the other, whether that other is a dead parent, a distant planet, or a dying species.
This membrane, and what it causes, is in many ways the jumping-off point of Bewilderment. We’re introduced to Theo, a widowed astrobiologist who spends his nights searching for signs of life on worlds lightyears away, while his days are consumed by the single instance of life he has left: his nine-year-old son, Robin.
Robin is a “rare” child: prone to explosive grief and anger, and possessed by a radical, agonising empathy for the Earth’s vanishing species. He is a boy who feels the weight of the planet’s sixth extinction as if it were a broken femur. This is exacerbated by the fact that both Theo and Robin are grieving the loss of the third, strongest, point in their triangle: Aly, a fierce environmental activist and Robin’s mother. Theo is torn between protecting his son from a world that wants to medicate him into compliance and the desire to let Robin’s singular light burn bright. How do you raise a child who is so much in a world that is so little?
Robin’s passionate reactions about injustice, in the face of our collective numbness, creates this recurring sense that he might be the only one seeing things like they are. For Robin, looking is a double-edged sword. Unlike the adults in his life (and us readers), he sees beauty, but he cannot ignore the rot at the edges of the frame. In his own way, Robin himself is a lonely species struggling to survive in a hostile habitat.
I think the power of Bewilderment—and indeed most of Powers’ novels—is the sheer manipulation of scale. Much like Robin’s scopes, Powers constantly shifts the lens from the flight of a single bird to the cold and indifferent math of the stars. There is a constant feeling of vertigo reading the novel that mirrors the disorientation of being alive and trying to find joy in the Anthropocene. You find yourself waiting with bated breath for the next catastrophe to overwhelm the ecstasy of a joyful moment.
In between conversations about the Fermi paradox, rogue planets and protesting injustice, Powers makes us aware of a cosmic loneliness that only held at bay by the warmth of another person’s arm around your shoulders. And that is uplifting and devastating in equal measures.
(Powers’ The Overstory remains one of my all-time favourites, as seen in my library, but Bewilderment is capable of usurping it).