For the holidays, my friends Elaine and <a href=”http://www.docrpm.com”>Ryan</a> gave me a beautiful edition of Dava Sobel’s <a href=”http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/author.pperl?authorid=29038″><span style=”font-weight:bold;”><span style=”font-style:italic;”>The Planets</span></span></a>, published last fall by Viking.
If you’ve ever read an English translation of Charles Baudelaire’s <span style=”font-weight:bold;”><span style=”font-style:italic;”>Paris Spleen</span></span>, you’ll have a strong sense of how tight and pleasing this book is. As Baudelaire made no attempt to replace the short story, the poem, or the novel with his revolutionary prose poems, Sobel makes no attempt to replace more expansive tomes on the subjects she tackles with bracing economy.
The Solar System. Nine planets with violent, awesome histories. Acknowledgments, bibliography, glossary, and errata aside, she tells her story in only 234 pages. Mercury she covers in 20 pages. Saturn in 16. I had to reread the Mercury chapter before I realized that she so successfully had tapped Greek, Roman, and Babylonian mythology, every astronomical luminary from Plato to Kepler, and the voyages of <span style=”font-style:italic;”>Mariner 10</span> and the forthcoming MESSENGER, all without forgetting to paint a vivid picture of the planet itself.
She spins about her planets a web of wonder that the subject matter demands. She even manages to mention God and the Bible without resorting to facile manglings of fact and fantasy (which is all the rage, these days).
What I like most about Sobel’s book, however, is her prose. It’s colorful and thick (which is very different from impenetrable), with a Baudelarian lyricism to it that neatly supports the massive leaps of imagination we must take to follow her around a star system.