Andrew Crumey
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Reviews of Sputnik Caledonia
Never has astrophysics seemed so touching and funny. TelegraphHugely rewarding... lingers long in the mind. Observer
Yet again [Crumey] has produced a novel that should bring with it a surge of support for his winning a major literary prize. Books Quarterly
Emotionally powerful and intensely satisfying... a quantum leap forward for the Scottish novel. Scotland on Sunday
A warm and moving portrait of Scottish small-town life. Times
The balance between these contrasting worlds is handled deftly. New Statesman
Crumey makes it hang together both as plot and as emotional experience. Time Out (Book of the Week: 5 stars)
This master of making our heads spin has found out how to hit the heart. Asylum
I can't remember the last time I was so reluctant to put a book down. Scotsman
Crumey writes brilliantly about being a boy... A brio of a book. Spectator
Chirpily surreal... a Moorcockian tale of interleaving realities. Times Literary Supplement
An ingenious blend of philosophy, physics and fantasy...immensely stimulating and entertaining. Sunday Telegraph
Books Quarterly, issue 28 (Joe Melia)
During his offbeat and eccentric childhood in 1970s Scotland, Robbie Coyle longed to be an astronaut. Heavily influenced by his ardently socialist father and with an increasingly unchecked imagination, Robbie is drawn towards Soviet space exploration, immersing himself in Einstein's theories and episodes of 'Young Scientist Of The Year'. But then, as Robbie's fantasies become ever more fanciful, we are flung forward to a bleak dystopia that crushes the very idea of impossible desires.
Still relatively unknown after six highly acclaimed works of fiction, Andrew Crumey continues to blend his appetite for science with a gift for conjuring wholly convincing worlds. Yet again he has produced a novel that should bring with it a surge of support for his winning a major literary prize.
Time Out "Book of the Week" 28.3.08 (Roz Kaveney)
The nature both of writing and reading fiction is that we explore other ways of being ourselves - in this, fiction is like dreaming, or like inhabiting the many alternate worlds of sf and quantum physics. Andrew Crumey's novels have always been as much about the possibilities of metafiction as about the three-dimensional characters he creates; 'Sputnik Caledonia' is at once sensitive about loss and hard-earned maturity, and intelligent about fools' paradises and the people who fabulate and live in them.
Young Robbie Coyle is growing up in a time and a place and a set of mental attitudes that are now almost unimaginable and unbearable in their nostalgia - the slight, complacent, Labour-left assumptions of a pre-Thatcher world. His shop-steward father has taught him well, even when 12-year-old Robbie does not entirely understand - there is an innocence to these early chapters, and it is not only Robbie who is an innocent. He explores the small Scottish town where he lives, starts to notice girls and has ambitions of being a cosmonaut - because obviously no son of his father would want to go into space with Americans...
Suddenly, reality shifts and Robbie is 19 and a young conscript in the space programme of a Soviet bloc Scotland. He simultaneously believes in the ideals that motivate his colleagues and is entirely aware of the negative side of what is a long way from utopia. He protects the Christian daughter of his landlady and tries to help a political prisoner forced into whoredom. When asked to be an informer, he temporises but betrays nobody. In the end, Robbie discovers that even the people he admires are betraying him: lofty motives can be as nightmarish as a base will to power.
The closing sections of the book are equally bleak. Robbie's father copes with the modern world and the onset of Alzheimer's, and an unnamed runaway makes deals with a mysterious stranger. The point about all of this is that Crumey makes it hang together both as plot and as emotional experience, even when strict logic crumbles and is lost.
Times Literary Supplement 4.4.08 (M. John Harrison)
The chirpily surreal title of this novel sums up Andrew Crumey's work, which sites itself at a risky double intersection between physics and comedy, sci-fi and serious contemporary fiction.
The story of Robbie Coyle begins in Scotland in the 1970s. Boredom shapes his secure and decent boyhood, but from the moment he encounters a book called 'Rocket To The Stars' his ambition is to be a cosmonaut - not an astronaut but a proper, Russian cosmonaut. He tries to read Einstein. Cosmic signals reach him from the family radiogram. When a teacher asks him what he did in his summer holiday, Robbie forgets the Coyle family's rainy fortnight in Rothesay and tells the class about his training regime instead. His flight simulator, in the cupboard under the kitchen sink, smells of 'Pledge and dead beetles'; for verisimilitude he dons welding hgoggles and a balaclava. He has learned to count backwards from twenty, in Russian: 'In Russian,' he thinks, 'some letters are written back to front and others are completely made up.' He has mastered 'Good morning', too, though he feels it might be of limited value during a solo mission. Invited to read 'Jane Eyre' as part of an exercise to focus his attention on 'real life and ordinary people', he gives up as quickly as he gave up on 'Kidnapped'.
All of this is charming and funny, a little reminiscent of David Mitchell's 'Black Swan Green' but with added physics; it is the Bildungsroman of a Scots geek. But then Robbie, age thirteen, kisses a girl at a dance, and suddenly he is thrown forward, or more properly, sideways - into a future which will be immediately recognizable to readers of Crumey's previous novels 'Music, in a Foreign Language' (1994) and 'Mobius Dick' (2004). Scotland is part of a Soviet-style "British Democratic Republic". The alternate Robbie finds himself in a secret research institute known as "the Installation". He is training, alongside other experimental subjects, to be placed in a capsule and dropped from a great height. On the day, an electric probe will be inserted into his rectum; during the predicted ninety seconds of free fall this device will stimulate him to such an orgasm that his body becomes an aerial, tuned to receive "scalar waves" from a black hole that has entered the solar system. There will not be time for a parachute to open. While the capsule is never described as smelling of Pledge, there are enough other clues for us to suspect this level of being in itself a fantasy.
If the first part of 'Sputnik Caledonia' recalls David Mitchell, the second is reminiscent of Colin Wilson's psychosexual science fiction. Life in the British Democratic Republic has a grey, leathery feel, the dystopia of materialism in an unproductive economy. Dinner ladies double as prostitutes. Sex is cheap, and as grim as the food. Everyone betrays everyone else. The romance of science is brutalized in every encounter, along with the romance of romance. Against the Installation's sexual reductivism - symbolised by Rosalind, the experimental psychophysicist who gets men masturbating by force of will alone - Robbie can set only an adolescent protest: surely there must be more to life? Crumey does his best to offset the sentimentality of this, by offering sly comedy, a tour of modern cosmology, and a reference library which lends out 'The Wizard of Oz' as readily as Goethe's 'Wilhelm Meister'. But - curiously enough, in a writer of ideas - what he is best at is people.
Dr Muir, who thinks too much imagination may be a cause of bedwetting; Mr Tulloch the paedophilic science teacher who tries to introduce him to Immanuel Kant's astronomical discoveries; Robbie's long-suffering parents: drawn into his fantastic revision of the world, confounded by the oblique trajectories of his vision, they can only offer television shows, Sunday dinners, political advice he cannot understand (at one point he receives the phrase "dialectics of history" as "Daleks of history"). Later, he is just a gap in their lives. We all start out with dreams in our head, his mum tells herself, but we learn to adjust. She started out wanting to be Judy Garland, but all she wants now is a hip replacement. Meanwhile, her husband wanders aimlessly about the town, his memory going, his thoughts disordered, his head full of "the junk of his old and tired imagination", unaware how kind they are being to him in the local supermarket. From being Robbie's support, ordinary people become the support of the novel itself.
Which of Robbie Coyle's worlds has primacy? In which of them can he be said to exist? Like the writers of the television drama 'Life on Mars', Andrew Crumey is too canny in the end to give us a single answer. The novel's final section gets under way with the sense of bets being hedged. The two states - of being or not being real - remain in superposition; then 'Sputnik Caledonia' takes off in a third, unexpected direction, and we are left with a Moorcockian tale of interleaving realities, of endless epic self-reinvention; in a universe where "every story you can possibly think of is true" and the very idea of a single life, a single suite of choices, is a dream for "sad losers". You can be anything you want to be. Disappointingly, this wet dream for cheerful losers, carefully coded over the past twenty years into every computer game, fantasy novel and advertisement for hair gel, ends the book.