This Kingdom Of Dust

His self-confessed obsession with the ill-fated Titanic was David Dyer’s motivation for writing his emotionally gripping 2016 novel The Midnight Watch. Centred on the role of the SS Californian, whose crew saw the Titanic’s distress signals but mysteriously failed to respond, the novel is part historical fiction and part psychological thriller. Dyer’s recently released and equally fascinating novel This Kingdom of Dust deals with another of his obsessions: space travel. This audacious re-writing of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing transforms the triumphalist narrative that transfixed the world into a haunting tale of devastating mechanical failure, and by extension, the failure of America’s attempt to conquer outer space.

You don’t have to be a space buff to enjoy this highly readable, at times unbearably tense and always thought-provoking story about ‘one small step for a man’ and its chilling aftermath. Dyer’s extensive research into the logistics of the mission is seamlessly integrated into a depiction of the interior lives of the novel’s three perspectives: the astronaut Buzz, his wife Joan, and a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Aquarius, commissioned by Life magazine to write the story of the Apollo adventure. In the process, we are confronted with some of the ‘big’ existential questions: is there a God, and if so, why does he appear to have abandoned us? What price are we willing to pay to achieve fame and heroic status? Is the literal dust of the moon a symbol for the void at the heart of human endeavour? Or does ‘the kingdom’ remind us that we are more than physical beings who will ultimately be rescued from our creaturely mortality?

As the astronauts contemplate what appears to be their inevitable death, the question hovers in the increasingly toxic air they are forced to breathe: ‘is this all?’ The same question also troubles the astronauts’ wives. Echoing the trailblazing feminist writer Betty Friedan, ‘is this all?’ was a radical challenge in the 1960s to the belief that wife- and motherhood was the source of a woman’s happiness and sense of completion. If This Kingdom of Dust is an exciting exploration of outer space, it’s also an intelligent form of social history that questions not only the obligatory passivity of the astronauts’ wives – their role is simply to wait while their husbands inspire the nation – but of pre-feminist women in general, consigned to what Aquarius calls their ‘cage’ of domesticity. But the novel also questions this belief, in its reminder that children can be as wonderfully unexpected and rewarding as the public achievements of men.

Combining historical re-imagining, social history, scientific research and personal drama, This Kingdom of Dust also deliberately questions the ethics of re-writing history in fictional form. While the character Aquarius, speaking to an audience, is given the novel’s last word, the hostility of the questions that follow his speech leave it up to us to decide if his blatant distortion of historical facts can be justified. And if so, on what grounds?

Dyer's new novel is an engrossing and innovative re-writing of a celebrated moment in history that encourages us to question the nature of success, the value of faith and the limits of loyalty.