Solaris

by Stanislav Lem

Last year, before the sad demise of Hastings pier - now closed and under
liquidation but thankfully not yet under liquid - I was wallowing in
melancholia and feeling nostalgic about lost relationships. With the
churning of the ocean crashing beneath me, as I sipped my tea and mused
lugubriously, it occurred to me that being in such a place may have inspired
the science fiction novel Solaris, by Stanislav Lem.
In a bid to milk my melancholia further I decided to re-read it and
eventually found my copy deep in a cardboard box.

I confess that reading it was not the near-mystic transport I was hoping for
and I felt a flatness, an everydayness running through the story. Yet this
was not at all attributable to bad writing, but was an expression of a daily
existence on an almost deserted space station, surrounded by space, silence
and time. Then from this quiet, like newly born islands hot and smoking,
there were moments of startling imagination contributing an overall
intensity of atmosphere which hung over the lull.

The book is set above an extraordinary planet and the speculations of the
nature of the planet and the descriptions of the way the planet changes give
an impression of fragile psychadelia. Together, the quiet of the ship and
the strangeness of the planet set a mood in which the poignancy of
melancholy and guilt were set into high relief by Lem's explorations into
the psyche; so that after finishing the book, as I had remembered from the
first time, I felt haunted by it. The quiet flatness of the humdrum life of
the ship fell away in my memory leaving a feeling of strangeness and sadness
that stayed with me for days and again I thought, this book must have been
written on a pier or a ship, with nothing but the ocean heaving below and a
pain in the heart.

Those who have seen the film by Andrey Tarkovsky will already have glimpsed
something of the mood and eeriness and suspect already that the book is
worth reading. For those who haven't I would recommend this book for a
quiet, thoughtful weekend when you can afford to feel.

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