Solaris

Image from here

Ok, so no reviews for absolutely ages, I haven’t read anything in a while that has really inspired me to write about it.

Until…. Solaris! What a mind trip… I have to prepare myself mentally when I am about to embark on the next few pages when I pick it up again (it’s another slow burner). The atmosphere is so heavy in this book it feels like the author (Stanislaw Lem) has cast a creepy spell making it feel as if you are in outer space with the protagonist, Kelvin.

The book begins with Kelvin landing on a space station on the planet Solaris. He is there to join a pre-existing team of scientists and researchers. Straight away, there is something that isn’t quite right. The men he meets there are sinister and don’t answer his questions. So far, so creepy. However, the most genius thing of the book is the planet’s only inhabitant.

The ocean. No two scientists can agree whether this massive entity is intelligent or primeval. They know it isn’t a cellular structure, but what they don’t understand is how it can possibly think for itself and create activity and phenomena.

This sets up Lem very well for what begins to be seen as a sadly beautiful picture of grief and suppressed dark desire. This isn’t really a science fiction novel in the contemporary canon, but of the older kind where a setting in space seemed also about an exploration of philosophical ideas.
All the inhabitants of the space station are haunted by their own private ghosts- manifested into flesh and blood hallucinations.
Kelvin feels responsible for the suicide of his wife 10 years previously. She comes back to him at the station, and he can’t reconcile himself with her death, repeatedly swerving between extremes of familiar recognition and sickening guilt. At first he tries to get away from her – just a copy of the real girl he loved – but after a while he begins to be reconciled to her presence in strange ways, but she becomes slowly aware of her transience and is in agony as a result...
In a way, it is wonderful that Andrey Tarkovsky made the film adaptation of Solaris, you only have to look at this wonderful book of his polaroids to understand that he knew something about loss and longing.
Give it a try, even if you usually give science fiction a miss. There are some undervalued gems in this genre.