The narrator and heroine of this wonderful short novel (220 pp.) is Solvig. She’s thirty-seven and seemingly doing well but she has unrequited dreams of doing something outstanding and she’s reached a crisis point in her three-year relationship with James. She’s finally told him she loves him but he wants a baby and she’s contemplating leaving her current job. She’s a commercial deep-sea diver. She works for an oil company and when working, lives inside a compression chamber for weeks on end, breathing in a highly compressed mixture of helium and oxygen, with no one with her but the other members of the diving crew. She likes it that way. She has a high need for independence. There’s no hidden psychological trauma that made her that way, or at least not that she knows of. It’s just the way she is. Her mother died when she was young and her father has his failings but she never felt unloved or abandoned by him. James is like that too. He’s a tattoo artist, fixated on marine creatures which she creates as beautiful airy drawings on other people’s skin. He’s got tattoos all over his own body of course and he lost a leg below the knee in a car accident years before. He has always liked his time alone too. They’re decent people who have found a way to be together while still living part of their lives separated. A baby’ll change that, that’s for sure.
Solvig hasn’t told James that she has applied to be one of a hundred people selected to colonize Mars not now, but ten years in the future, with ever-increasing obligations on her time as blastoff draws nearer. She should tell him but she keeps putting it off. The Mars Project is a privately funded venture, with application open to anyone. There’s a lot of hoopla at every stage of the selection process. Solvig makes it to the semi-final selection stage: they post her picture and her essay on why she wants to go to Mars on line for spectators to vote. She still hasn’t told James a thing although they’re trying for a baby now. She doesn’t even know if she can get pregnant or carry a baby to term after all her years of work in high compression atmospheres. And she’s thirty-seven. The risks increase exponentially for women in their late thirties or older.
Solvig goes to one of the selection events –she hasn’t told James where she’s going, she made up a lie about it. There, she meets a seven-month pregnant contestant, Evie. They get along, go back to Evie’s for a drink, and a couple of drinks later, Solvig finds herself in bed with a partially undressed Evie. Solvig is tempted, but she stops it with a kiss, says she can’t do this and leaves. She goes back to James, determined to quit her diving job so she can lead a normal life with James where they’re not apart for weeks on end. But James has learned of her participation in the Mars Project and when she tells him about Evie, he leaves. He can’t take living with someone who lied like that to him. Then she finds she’s pregnant. James is going to be a father. But what about them, James and Solvig? What will they be? Or will they be anything but a memory?
This is a woman’s novel in the amplest, most positive sense of the phrase. Solvig is admirable but real and the dilemma she faces is one that women have faced age after age: how much do you give up of your aspirations to stay with someone you love and want to be with? And are you willing to pay the cost of bringing a child into this world? There are no bad guys in this fine novel. It’s hard, though, sometimes for even good guys to fit together.
Another virtue of this tale is that there are no easy answers in it. Sounds like life, doesn’t it?
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