An author who begins to work on a novel has to decide what relationship the story will bear to reality as we know it — will it be a realist work? a surrealist work? an irreal work? In Brian Biswas’ new novel, The Astronomer, he has chosen to confound us frequently regarding how he and the main character regard reality, and we are often forced to think about our own ways of looking at the real and the fantastic, about fact and fiction. Portions of this work have appeared in The Cafe Irreal because we felt that they undermined reality in the way an irreal work does, but in The Astronomer Biswas plays with many possibilities, shifting from psychologically complex depictions of love to descriptions of the universe which are sometimes so strange we don’t always know if they are realist or not. Furthermore, he also challenges us to think about whether or not the dreams and other mental wanderings of people who don’t have “normal” mental lives constitute another reality as well.
The novel is framed by two descriptions of the viewpoint character, Franz Herbert. The preface is by a professor who says he knew Herbert from Peoria Astronomical Society meetings during the 1960s; the postscript is by a psychiatrist who practices medicine in Peoria. The rest of the novel, told in the first person, is a series of essays and memoir-like sketches written by Herbert himself. Both the professor and the psychiatrist reveal that Herbert says he can travel at will around the cosmos and that gods and goddesses rule over the stars and planets. About Herbert, the psychiatrist says: “…I was puzzled by his inability–or unwillingness–to focus on the real world. On further reflection perhaps it isn’t puzzling at all. Herbert was clearly unable to separate fact from fiction.” Biswas makes sure that the reader is constantly forced to think about this and in a number of ways.
Descriptions of the cosmos that are based on current scientific theory — e.g., of black holes or the idea of an expanding and contracting universe — sound so strange sometimes that an unfamiliar reader might be inclined to think they are fictions. But many of the descriptions in The Astronomer are based on scientific theory and encourage us to look up black holes, for example, to see how they are regarded by astronomers and astrophysicists today. On the other hand, the interweaving of descriptions of gods and goddesses (and other mythological figures) with the descriptions of the heavens are clearly fictional, unless of course you are a believer in Zeus or Jupiter as the Greeks and Romans once were. And in fact belief seems to be a part of our relationship to what is real and what is not. Does Herbert really believe that he can travel at will through the universe? Do we?
As another subtle way of undermining reality as we know it, Biswas sometimes alters historical fact. Wasn’t it, we ask ourselves, Clyde W. Tombaugh who discovered Pluto? This occurs often enough to make us wonder if we are in an alternate universe. Ultimately, Briswas creates an interplay of fact and fiction so complex that the reader either has to look up everything he or she has questions about or allow the alternation of fact and fiction to pass through consciousness like a fascinating stream of neutrinos. Even the description of Herbert’s life given in the postscript differs in significant ways from the description he gives in the first-person section of the book. What is fact? What is reality? We at The Cafe Irreal enjoy playing with the answers to those questions, and so does Brian Biswas.
You can find The Astronomer at https://whiskeytit.com/product/the-astronomer/
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