The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 1 July 2025
by Ruby Todd
We all go a little crazy when crazy things happen. We certainly cannot assert that the world is anything but crazy these days. Indeed, has it ever been otherwise? So, when events of some magnitude bestow themselves upon humanity, disasters, heat-waves, dramatic movements of peoples, celestial apparitions, then it isn't much of a surprise when people act a little strangely. For centuries, we've thought that the mere apparition of a full Moon was enough to make us all a little lupine (loopy?). Now we're mesmerised by the "Super Moon", less common and just as harmless. When something even less common occurs in the sky, a lunar or solar eclipse, the appearance of a comet, we hang on the words of the scientists who tell us what is going on and how to watch it all safely. At the same time, we tend to lean towards the charlatans and gurus who want to convince us that these are signs of something greater, usually portents of doom, or visits from beyond the stars. There's ample connection in history between celestial events and dramatic human events. On the other hand, we just established that human history is basically crazy. When a celestial event happens, it is bound to be near the time of some great event in human history. It's just the odds.
So, let us return to Australia in the waning years of the 1990s, at the time of a great bright comet that is making its way to a bright display in the evening sky. Comet St. John, it turns out, was discovered at a nearby observatory and named, as is common, for its discoverer. The comet (whose appearance and history strongly resemble that of Hale-Bopp, which paid a gorgeous visit to the Earth's neighborhood in 1996-97) is celebrated and feared. Sylvia Knight, our narrator and protagonist, places her story squarely between its discovery and the night of its greatest brightness, a period of a couple of years full of significant life events for her. For reasons quite unrelated to, but coincident with, the comet's arrival, Sylvia has decided her life is to end. But before that can happen, in her work at a local funeral parlor, she meets the astronomer, Theo St. John, who discovered this comet. Things move quickly with, perhaps, an unlikely lack of curiosity about who this man really is and why he seems to harbor such a gloomy manner.
The night of her chosen demise comes before half way through the book. What happens next is very much drawn from the disturbing story of a 1997 death cult, and what they chose to do when comet Hale-Bopp flew by. Joseph, mourning his mother's death and trying to arrange an appropriate burial for her, is twisted by grief into something of a guru for a handful of people in the community. He is drawn to Sylvia and Theo, and sees them as Earth-bound adversaries. Sylvia is drawn in, and the mystery with which this book started, the perpetrator behind the accident that killed her husband on the night the comet was discovered, is also entwined with the procession of inevitable cultish events in this small Australian town.
So it will be apparent that things go from grim to more grim. There is a lot of foreboding about death here, or merely the inkling that life isn't going just right. People are excited by the comet, but they're considering its meaning in their lives. This, of course, is because we are all looking for signs of meaning, and the lack of meaning can be emotionally deadening. People don't make the best decisions at such times. At the same time, though, the novel encourages its characters, and its readers, to seek the glimmers of light that life on planet Earth does offer to us all. Given the choice between a deadening dwell upon the past, or upon loss, and life, the choice must always be for life. The book has its strengths. Having lived through Hale-Bopp's apparition, this reader had a good sense of where it was going, but don't let that stop you from giving it a good look.