“You think this explains everything,” my grandfather said. He freighted the word explains with as much contempt as it would bear before exiling it from his mouth. “Me and your grandmother. Your mother. My time in prison. The war.” He turned from the window. In his eyes, through the haze of hydromorphone, I saw a flash of something I took, based on the historical record, for anger. “You think it explains you.”Moonglow clearly states on its cover that this is a novel, and in a preliminary author's note, Michael Chabon assures the reader that liberties with the facts “have been taken with due abandon”, but still, when this book is about a narrator named Mike Chabon who finally hears his grandfather's life story on the old man's deathbed, and then this Chabon character writes out the facts of this story with corraborating evidence and interviews that he gathers throughout the ensuing years, I not only suspended my disbelief, but I wanted every word of this to be true. And especially because the grandfather (never named) was such an amazing character, and especially because Chabon wrote about him with such respect, and insight, and humour. No matter where Moonglow falls on the scale of truthiness, I enjoyed every minute of it; my favourite Chabon since The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.
I don't want to go over the whole story of the grandparents except to note that it was because the grandfather was an Engineer, with an Engineer's instinct to fix the broken, that he was attracted to the beautiful French refugee when they first met after WWII (and boy, was she broken). But I do want to remember here that the heart of this book seems to be the Engineer's fascination with space flight and his experience during the war as part of Operation Paperclip: tasked with finding the Nazi rocket scientists as the Allieds advanced across Europe, the grandfather was in particular hoping to meet his hero, Werner von Braun. But when he arrived at the Nordhausen concentration camp – the site from where the first images of the skeletal camp survivors were broadcast to a shocked world – and learned that von Braun himself often selected which prisoners would be worked to death on his projects, the (unobservant Jewish) grandfather was forced to reconsider his estimation of the man (shared here at length):
What he saw that day, and what he heard from the survivors he questioned, persuaded him that there was no way Werner von Braun could have been technical director of the V-2 program while remaining unaware of how business was conducted in the Mittelwerk. Von Braun could not be crowned with the glory of the rocket without shouldering the burden of its shame. All the suffering my grandfather saw had been amassed and all the cruelty deployed at the prompting and in service to von Braun's dream. It turned out the V-2 was not a means to liberate the human spirit from the chains of gravity; it was only a pretext for further enchainment. It was not an express bound for the stars but a mail rocket carrying one simple message, signed in high-explosive amatol with the name of Baron von Braun. For a time, maybe, its grandeur and its beauty had blinded von Braun to all the ways in which he was busily betraying it. That was only human, the common lot. But once your dream revealed itself, like most dreams, to be nothing but a current of raw compulsion flowing through a circuitry of delusion and lies, then that was the time to give it up. That was the time to damn your dreams and trust your eyes. And maybe cock your revolver.As the grandfather settles into a postwar life filled with challenges ordinary and extraordinary, there is no small irony to the fact that von Braun is eventually lauded as the father of space travel and treated like an American hero. (Later in life, the grandfather notes that he may have been overly harsh in his demonisation of von Braun – no one is blaming Einstein for nuclear weapons after all – but Chabon himself muses intriguingly: Usually, you could rely on Americans to believe the worst about their heroes, but nobody wanted to hear that America's ascent to the Moon had been made with a ladder of bones.)
Like I said, I wanted so much of this book to be true (the snake hammer) and feared that other parts might be (the skinless horse), and although an author doesn't owe me an off-the-page account of which parts I should really believe, I eventually found this article in The Globe and Mail that will serve an my explanation:
“What emerged was, in many ways, an authentic memoir – not of my grandfather, but of myself,” he says. “The book is, in some strange way, an autobiography. It’s an autobiography of my imagination, my imaginative life, and an autobiography of my, I don’t know – my psyche.”A love story, a unique slant on the Jewish experience, a cleverly plotted yarn, a peek into Chabon's psyche; I loved, loved, loved this book.
