‘I’m not sure I always enjoyed this picture of Quaker earnestness, but I can’t deny its plausibility.’ Photo: 'The Dazzle of Day' book cover.
The Dazzle of Day by Molly Gloss
Author: Molly Gloss. Review by Joseph Jones
This novel about Quakers travelling in outer space, published over twenty years ago, was reissued recently in a new edition. Its author is not a Friend but, like Walt Whitman, from whose poetry the title is taken, she considers the silence ‘after the dazzle of day is gone’. What happens, in this instance, after the devastation of a planet? What happens 175 years after you’ve left it in search of a new place to call home? Is it, like for Whitman, silence that ‘moves the symphony true’?
Attender or not, Molly Gloss is obviously a student of Quaker processes. Meetings for business drive much of the narrative, and they feel familiar. She also has a good ear for the way Friends speak. Consider this, from a discussion on whether the community should move from the relative safety of their spaceship to a new, but desolate, planet: ‘Where there’s a hardship, generally there’s a grace to be found in it… On that world… it’s all hardship, and I wonder: What is the saving grace?… Maybe it’s a bare-bones existence that we’d be enriched by… Maybe the hardships would be a good thing.’ I’m not sure I always enjoyed this picture of Quaker earnestness, but I can’t deny its plausibility.
The pace of the writing, fitting for a book about Friends and their processes, is not fast. A lot happens – crash landings, rescue missions, a plague – but the focus is on the internal deliberations of the main characters (middle-aged or elderly women of colour, for the most part, in rare headline roles). As such it doesn’t always feel like traditional science fiction. It’s light on technology, and too casual with it for serious sci-fi fans. It’s also a little dated in its treatment of mental health. But the medium provides its usual opportunities for ground-level moral consideration and Gloss has the courage to ask some huge questions: is life worth saving if community has to be short-changed to maintain it? If it has to isolate itself in a sterile box, separate from the rest of creation? (You can see why it might make a pertinent read right now.)
This isolation is two-fold. Humans need company. But any particular company of humans will itself become sterile without new light. Some of our galaxy-travelling Friends know this: ‘Are we thinking we can go on living forever inside the little circle of each other’s arms, without… joining ourselves to the cosmos? Without letting our arms open to touch the arms of the rest of Creation? There isn’t any meaning in anything except in its relation with other things.’
The novel thrives on its empathy. The sense of shared responsibility is palpable. We feel the real fear of jumping ship, and what happens when we change. But best of all it makes us face the alternatives: what happens if we don’t?
