Bewilderment by Richard Powers: A call to arms for empathy and action

Bewilderment

Author: Richard Powers

ISBN-13: 978-1785152634

Publisher: Hutchinson

Guideline Price: £14.99

“It changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it… It changed how I see things and that’s always, for me, a mark of a book worth reading.”

With this recommendation from Barack Obama and a shortlisting for the Booker Prize, Bewilderment comes with a weight of expectation. Richard Powers’s most unusual novel lives up to the hype, not only because it is, technically speaking, a great read, a story with striking characterisation of a father-and-son duo, written in precise, enlightening prose, but also because it stretches beyond fiction to make the reader care about the real world.

Books about climate change and ecological disaster are not easy sells for many readers. Speaking at an event in the RDS some years back, writer and activist Naomi Klein said that the difficulty was getting people interested in problems that seem too far away in time and space, specifically beyond 30 years, the life cycle of a generation or the average mortgage. In a capitalist society, we think in terms that are too small, too short-sighted, too self-orientated. In his new novel, Powers has managed to come up with an antidote.

Theo Byrne, the narrator of Bewilderment, is a promising astrobiologist and widowed father of a nine-year-old boy. Despite Theo’s grief and struggles as a single parent in suburban Wisconsin, he has a notable curiosity and care for the world beyond his own back yard. At work he’s part of a team that models the potential for life on other planets. At home he takes his son Robin through these discoveries on the computer, hoping to educate him.

More urgently, these virtual visits work to distract Robin from the heightened emotional states and erratic behaviours that have increased since the death of his mother, Ali, two years previously.

Bewilderment wears its mammoth subject matter lightly. In a dexterous narrative, the various strains complement each other, with the connections left to the reader to figure out: “Every one of us is an experiment, and we don’t even know what the experiment is testing.” Private and public worlds are in disarray. Theo and Robin’s planet-hopping gives a loose structure and forward momentum to the book, while the outside world seems to go backwards.

The tone is never pedantic. Robin’s attempts to combat climate change and help his beloved animals show rather than preach. Theo, meanwhile, frequently sums things up in his stark, scientific style: “Everything had happened in broad daylight, and against shamelessness, outrage was impotent.”

Who is madder, this novel asks, a young boy who rages against all the waste and cruelty and injustice he sees around him, or a society who watches on indifferently?

Powers, the author of 13 novels, is a MacArthur Fellow who has received the National Book Award. His most recent book, The Overstory, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Booker. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains and his affinity with the landscape is evident in the camping trips that Theo and Robin take to get away from society: “A full Hunter’s Moon hung fat and red on the horizon. Through the circle of trees, so sharp it seemed within easy reach, the Milky Way spilled out – countless speckled placers in a black streambed.”

There is so much in this book that it seems impossible, and wrong, to cram it into a single review. It is at once a thoughtful exploration of individual grief, a study in empathy for the biosphere, a questioning of the medical profession's pathologising of children and a beginner's guide to astrobiology. There are echoes of the news agenda in recent years – a president who won't admit defeat, a teenage Scandinavian climate activist, ice shelves breaking off Antarctica: "Heads of state were testing the outermost limits of public gullibility. Little wars were flaring everywhere."

Throughout, Theo is an erudite, likable guide. His scientific explanations to Robin, and by proxy the reader, are never condescending or overly simplistic. Similarly, Powers gets the balance right with a sci-fi esque subplot about an empathy machine experiment run by university colleagues, which in lesser hands could stretch credibility.

For all its learnings, readers will be drawn to this book for the father-and-son pairing at the centre. There is a sense of an almost hermetically sealed parent-child relationship, akin to Emma Donoghue’s Room, but in this instance the barriers are invisible, the villain the world at large. Who is madder, this novel asks, a young boy who rages against all the waste and cruelty and injustice he sees around him, or a society that watches on indifferently?

Bewilderment is both cerebral and heartfelt, a rigorous and damning assessment of the state of the world today. A call to arms for empathy and action, that is, incidentally, a good bet for the Booker: “Life wanted something from us. And time was running out.”