Stanisław Lem: Solaris

Kelvin arrives at a space station, and the first thing he meets is a corpse. His old mentor, Gibarian, by his own hand. The station is wrong: doors that shouldn’t be locked, a scientist who won’t come out of his room, the smell of panic everywhere. And you read these hundred pages exactly the way you read any crime novel: leaning in, counting the clues, repeating the two questions the genre drilled into you. What happened here. And who did it.

Because the first half is unmistakably crime. An enclosed space, a dead man, unreliable witnesses, a presence that has to be explained. And crime is the genre of closure: it promises that the world is decipherable, that the lock clicks at the end, that reason restores the order the crime broke. In exchange for fifty pages of tension it hands you the most human reward there is, understanding. Lem builds this machine to perfection, then brazenly yanks the rug out from under you.

Because he answers the small question. You learn what the “visitors” are: neutrino-structures the ocean builds out of the crew’s most deeply buried memories. Kelvin’s is Harey, his wife, who killed herself ten years ago because he drove her to it. Now she’s here, flesh and blood, a woman who doesn’t know she isn’t human, who can’t die because she keeps reconstituting. That answer is horror itself, and it works.

But the big question, what the ocean is and what it wants, has no answer. Not because Kelvin is too stupid to find it. Because Lem decided there isn’t one. As a thesis, that’s brave: a crime novel with no culprit, because the crime itself is unsolvable. (Eco ran the same play in The Name of the Rose. His detective cracks the case, then admits he cracked it by accident, and the prize burns to ash in his hands. Lem won’t grant you even that much.)

Up to here, hat off. From here, the knife comes out.

Because refusing the solution is one thing, and promising a crime novel and then handing over intellectual masturbation is a different order of nerve. The book’s spine is an invented science, “Solaristics”: decades of theory, a whole library’s worth of failure about a sea it never once touches. In the first half this is genius, the mountain of scholarship that never reaches the water. In the second half Lem falls in love with the sound of his own voice and shovels out page after page of this useless pseudo-literature: taxonomies of symmetriads, the discipline’s apocrypha, his own invented bibliography that a physicist-turned-novelist simply cannot stop writing. This isn’t withholding. It’s the cataloguing of a failure the reader conceded a hundred pages back.

And the ending is garbage. I won’t be polite about it: garbage. Sartorius builds the device that erases the visitors. Harey, for the record, chooses her own annihilation and Snaut helps her; they don’t “put her down.” It’s the one clean gesture in the book, and, incidentally, the only thing the human beings on that station are actually competent at. They can’t understand the ocean, but wiping out the body it gave them, that they can manage. Then they fire Kelvin’s brainwaves into the sea as X-rays: the “message.” Then the visitors stop. Then nothing.

And no, there’s no rescue party coming, which matters, because the truth is worse. Kelvin doesn’t wait to be saved. He stays. He goes down to the water, reaches a hand toward a wave, it mirrors his hand and never touches it, and he names the sea an “imperfect god,” and he stays, holding to the faith that the time of cruel miracles hasn’t passed. As philosophy, it lands. As an ending, it’s a plane that keeps taxiing down the runway after every passenger has already gotten off. Not a landing. The refusal to land, dressed up as depth.

I keep a rule that overwriting is always fear: the author doesn’t trust the idea to hold its own weight, so he says it three more times. Solaris breaks the rule. Here the overwriting isn’t fear, it’s arrogance, and arrogance aimed at the reader is a game of chicken. Lem is so certain of his thesis that he drives straight at you for eighty pages, pedal to the metal, and waits to see who jerks the wheel first. Who holds out longer, him or you? He won’t jerk it. He’s right, and he’s willing to prove it on the wreckage of your patience.

The same hubris sits Harry, Ron and Hermione in a tent to squabble for a hundred and thirty pages in The Deathly Hallows while the plot refuses to move an inch. Rowling could get away with it because the fan turns the pages regardless. Lem could get away with it because the reader will believe it’s profundity anyway, given enough boredom. The only difference is that with Rowling the nothing really is nothing, and with Lem the nothing is a brilliant thesis, beaten to death. The ending doesn’t float. It leaks.

The first half is a masterpiece. The second half is a genius who mistook his own throat-clearing for depth. In a game of chicken the reader has one move the arrogant author never sees coming: get out of the car. Read the first half twice, then step out, and let Lem win on the empty road.