Sputnik Caledonia
Andrew Crumey
 *Book One Robbie Coyle, nine years old at the start of the book, lives in Kenzie in Scotland’s Central Belt in the early 1970s. He dreams of going into space; but because of his father’s anti-American, pro-Soviet views, he wants to be a cosmonaut rather than an astronaut. He picks up an Eastern European radio station called Voice of the Red Star, imagines it to be a telepathic signal from another planet, and begs to be taken there. *Book Two Nineteen-year-old Robert Coyle lives in the British Democratic Republic – a Communist state founded after the overthrow of Nazi occupation in the “Great Patriotic War” – and has arrived at the Installation, a secret military base in Scotland, to take part in a space mission. A strange new object has been detected in the solar system, believed to be a black hole, and the volunteers are to explore it telepathically. Robert has confused memories of the time before his arrival, and the reader is left guessing the connection between Books One and Two. Perhaps the Robbie of Book One has been transported to the other world as he wished; or perhaps the Robert in Book Two is a “parallel” version of the younger Robbie in Book One. The Installation itself is like a “black hole” in the sense that people arrive from the outside, but nobody ever seems to leave - except perhaps in death. *Book Three In a present-day recognisable reality, Robbie’s parents from Book One are now pensioners. Their story alternates with that of “the kid”, a runaway 13-year-old obsessed with science fiction stories such as Doctor Who, and with the idea that “in an infinite universe everything is possible”. He meets a middle aged man (“the stranger”) who claims to be a spaceman on a mission. The stranger could be the parallel-world Robert grown older - or a terrorist engaged in identity theft. Resisting logical resolution, the novel reprises and reworks themes that have recurred throughout the course of the book, creating an aesthetic unity that is emotionally ambivalent: a juxtapostion of the comic tone of Book One with the dark pessimism of Book Two.