Radiance by Catherynne Valente

I am extraordinarily glad this book exists, even if I'm not entirely sure I understand it all. I mean, I understand what happens and how it fits together, but I feel like I'm probably missing a few thematic elements that would make it unfold like a flower (which is not an earth flower, more like a butterfly with a stem) in my mind. (See, I'm already making references that won't make sense to anyone who hasn't read the book.)

There are a bunch of different stories, but they're all stories about an absence. Not only that, they're stories about how we tell stories, about how we try to impose narrative sense on an inherently chaotic life, about how the movies structure thought, about how the gaze is directed, and getting back to the first point, about how stories can give the illusion of presence.

This is particularly striking because the main character, Severin, is never present during the book. I mean, she's frequently there, but in a news story, one of her father's movies, in the scripts he and his collaborator keep trying to write to make sense of her disappearance, and even in her own documentaries, but she's never actually there. This is a story that's being told because she is gone, and no one knows where, or whether she's alive or dead, or really whether or not that's a question that makes sense. What is a callowhale, anyway?

Let's take a step back. This is a book that is so entirely itself, exists so completely in a fully-developed world that is not our own, but has certain resonances with it. It means that when Valente lets us peek behind the curtain (behind the camera?), we have to open our minds and try to catch up. The sense of familiar alienness is not one that was exclusionary. Sometimes I find authors who develop their worlds so perfectly in their heads don't want to let readers in easily, or don't realize that they need to explain things that are so clear to them. That was not what I encountered here.

This is not our solar system, but we're brought into it gently enough that even when we don't know everything, we aren't entirely adrift - or at least, not any more adrift than the characters who were born there. They aren't entirely sure what the callowhales are either, even though they drink their milk in many forms, needing it to survive in interplanetary space.

The callowhales live on Venus (or do they?), floating in the seas there, either animal or vegetable or possibly island? (There almost feels like there's some distant kinship to C.S. Lewis' Venus.)  They give off something that is called milk, like many things in the solar system have been named after very different but sort of similar Earth analogues. Something in it makes life on other planets and in the vast spaces between the planets possible, and humankind has spread.

The movie business has taken over the moon, in this strange Art Deco-punk world, where something in the soil turns everyone blue, but everyone paints their skin so as not to show up strangely on screen on the other planets where they are not blue. There's this basic artifice at the movies before the first word is written or the first camera run.

Severin grew up in front of the camera, left on her famous director father's doorstep one stormy night, and the arrival was promptly restaged for his favourite camera, Clara. She turned away from his silent dramas to her own talkie documentaries, but Radiance makes the point that there are still choices in documentaries as to what is filmed and what is shared. We don't get to know Severin, we get to know the version of herself she chose for the world to see, the version that her audiences would never get to interact with. And we get the stories of her fated last documentary expedition, from those who loved her and possibly those who loved and hated her at the same time, as well as the young boy in the deserted town she found on Venus. We get all the lead-up to her disappearance, and we get her father's scripts trying to fit her story into a noir mystery, a fairy tale, a historical drama, and back to a mystery, one where all is revealed in one drawing-room scene.

But his answer to what happened to her, and indeed, to the secrets of the solar system, the callowhales, and the universe(s) aren't any more definitive than any of the movie transcripts, interviews, gossip columns or other accounts of which book is made up. This book is all about the gaze, but the person everyone is gazing at is gone, and as after every death, there are hanging threads and stories that are unfinished, there are questions unanswered. There is absence in the presence of all the material world they left behind. We turn our gaze on what's left behind, trying to make it make sense.

And the callowhales swim(?) on.