Michael Valentine Smith was born aboard the spacecraft "Envoy", during the first manned-mission to Mars. After landing, all radio contact was lost between the Envoy and Earth and when the remains of the spacecraft are discovered twenty five years later during the second mission to Mars, Michael Smith is also found alive and well, raised by Martians for the majority of his life. Smith returns to Earth and is an instant celebrity, and owner of a great fortune, owing to his parent's heritage and his claim to being the first human alive on Mars. Due to his Martian upbringing, Smith has a fair degree of difficulty in understanding human behaviour; he has never seen a women, has trouble understanding clothing, money and religion, amongst other things that don't exist in the Martian culture. To "protect" him from Earth-culture he is isolated in hospital and kept under guard. Nurse Gillian Boardman, sneaking into his private room, inadvertently becomes his first "water brother" by sharing a glass of water with him, a sacred act in Martian culture. Eventually she helps him escape, with the aid of reporter Ben Caxton to the mansion of Jubal Harshaw, famous author, lawyer and doctor who seeing Mike initially as naive, assumes the role of protecting him legally from the outside world. Mike exhibits telekinetic powers and the ability make things instantly and permanently disappear if he considers a "wrongness" in them, which he does when government agents try to arrest him and his friends. Eventually he is secured legal rights against those who try to exploit his situation, and leaves the care of Jubal to explore the world. Studying religion through his interactions with members of the fictional "Fosterite Church of the New Revelation", Mike starts his own "Church of all Worlds", inspired by Martian culture and elements of Human religion, where members learn the Martian language and associated psychic and telekinetic abilities. His new church creates a scandal with it's liberal ideas on monogamy and the afterlife and is eventually labelled as blasphemous, and burnt down by an angry mob of Fosterites and Mike is arrested by the police. After saving his followers and assuring his fortune will be bequested to the continuance of the church, Mike preaches to an angry mob and is beaten and killed.
Overall the concept of the book was an interesting one; we see Human society from the eyes of an outsider (i.e. Mike) providing a mechanism by which to analyse and criticise institutions such as marriage and the Church. The problem is that as the book was written in the 1950's the treatment of the issues feels very dated. One of the big ideas explored in the book is that of free-love vs. monogamy. Although, through Mike's philosophy, Heinlein advocates freedom of sexual expression, overall the text is still very sexist with too many fixed ideas about gender roles in love/sex. The book is fairly constrained in the notion of "free-love"; the definition here really only covers heterosexual relationships and where the woman's role is passive. Perhaps going any further might not have been accepted by the audience of the time. As in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (and as I hear in other Heinlein novels) there's a fair bit "preaching" in the conversations between his characters (i.e. characters go on rants about their firm political or philosophical ideas, quite possibly thinly veiled versions of the author's own beliefs).
All that said, the book is still an interesting read; Heinlein's writing is well-paced and easy to read and he keeps the action moving along well. Although the "preaching" can get a bit much, at least it's mostly written in an engaging fashion, so even though I found myself cringing sometimes, I wasn't really too bored with it. Based on what I found in the second-hand bookstore, I picked-up a 1991 re-published version of the book based on Heinlein's original manuscript (about 650 pages) which differed from the version published in 1961 that had been cut down significantly (for excessive length and to remove more controversial elements). I kind of wish I had read the original print because they were right about it being too long.
No comments:
Post a Comment