Farewell, Earth’s Bliss
★★★★★
After nine weeks confined in a small spaceship and drugged into passivity, a group of convicts arrive at Mars not knowing what awaits them.
The narrative focus is firmly on the characters — a psychologically dysfunctional yet incongruously stoic group whose crimes range from the political to murder. Seemingly resigned to their predicament, our attention is instead drawn to their personal obsessions and relationships. The book is of its time with misogyny, racism, and homophobia driving many characters’ motivations. The author doesn’t take a moral position, presenting these issues as the reality of the social order, but they make for harder reading today, not helped by a fair bit of wooden and inane dialogue.
After landing, the deportees face the harsh reality of subsistence living in an authoritarian society run by the unhinged. But the static sociopolitical construct is thin set-dressing for a loose set of personal character vignettes, eschewing the opportunity for deeper societal commentary or rebellion that would have gripped me. While the setting is science fictional, this could just as easily have been a bunch of character stories set in any harsh penal colony.
While credit is deserved for the ending, which I didn’t see coming, the overall narrative lacks a through plot — more a slice of grim life with little in the way of redemption, resolution, or enlightenment for the convicts. Compton is more interested in observation than interrogation, leaving his promising worldbuilding underexplored. I can see why the book has a literary reputation, but for me, it’s too character-focused, lacking plot and development. If this stasis is intended as the point, it’s one the novel fails to develop into insight. Ultimately, I didn’t care enough about these weird people to hold my interest in their petty soap operas.
