Accessible & Compelling SciFi: On Lily Brooks-Dalton’s ‘Good Morning, Midnight’
Brooks-Dalton’s novel builds a frame to house the moral and human questioning, but leaves the resolutions to the reader.
Lily Brooks-Dalton
Novel | 259 Pages | 6.4” x 9.2” | Reviewed: Hardcover
9780812998894 | First Edition | $16.00
Random House | New York | BUY HERE
“The cold would creep into the building, the pipes would freeze, the giant telescope lens would crack. Frost would creep across the windows, and eventually it would consume their cozy control room sanctuary, just as it had the rest of the outpost. Soon enough, winter would live here for good.”
Nothing is permanent — Lily Brooks-Dalton reminds us of this in Good Morning, Midnight, but she takes the theme further by demonstrating the extent of human endurance and willpower in tense, even life-threatening situations. Reading Good Morning, Midnight was like being gently reminded of, and even comforted by, the questions and fears many of us have and share concerning life, death, and family. The novel makes its reader reflect on these themes by engaging with the two central protagonists, Augustine “Augie” Lofthouse and “Sully” Sullivan, in two parallel journeys: that of the protagonists and that of the reader himself.
The novel is the equivalent of watching a sunrise. At first, the changes are gradual and almost inconsequential, making it easy to enjoy the view simply without thinking about it. It is only after some time, when the sky brightens significantly and the surroundings become visible, that the full emotional weight of the moment becomes evident. Good Morning, Midnight is careful and clever with its pacing — the plot unfolds in such a way that none of the tricks or secrets are revealed prematurely. Instead, the reader is very much like Sully who,
“turn[ing] her gaze to the whirling centrifuge, so small next to the rest of the ship[, was] amaz[ed] that all six of them had lived there for so long, jammed together in the midst of all this space.”
Set in either the present or a very near future, the story tells of the parallel journeys of the scientist Augustine “Augie” Lofthouse and astronaut “Sully” Sullivan. Returning home from their trip to Jupiter, Sully is haunted by an internal dilemma: her decision to leave her husband and daughter to become an astronaut. Meanwhile, stubborn loner Augie refuses to evacuate the research base in the Arctic with the rest of the scientists, despite being warned that anyone who remains behind will not be returned for. When an unspecified global catastrophe occurs, communication is cut off between Sully’s ship The Aether and Earth, and all the devices in the Arctic fall silent. What follows is a perilous physical and internal journey of the two main characters and their close companions, pushing Sully and Augie to reexamine not only themselves but also their relationships with those they’ve known and loved.
There are a lot of moments that I appreciated in the novel, especially in relation to Sully’s plotline. I find the idea of being stuck in space in a relatively small enclosed contraption to be very distressing and terrifying, and watching Sully meditate on her past, her mother and ex-husband and daughter, felt to me both familiar and not. Though I have not experienced most of the things Brooks-Dalton described, the vulnerability of her protagonists resonated with me. In some cases, I found myself almost “plugging into” Sully’s thoughts as if I were getting ready to discuss them with her. At other times, I inserted myself into her position, asking if I would feel the same way, like when she expressed the desire to know
“details of Earth […] want[ing] to be reminded of how it felt to be beneath the atmosphere, housed within that gentle daylit dome […] to remember how it felt to be held by Earth […] miss[ing] it all so keenly she felt the absence inside her abdomen, like a black hole sucking her organs into nothingness.”
Sully resonated more with me than Augie, whom I found to be rather problematic and choppy personality-wise. If Sully had a complete character arc, filled with the kind of growth and realization that I think readers not only expect from characters but experience themselves as human beings, then Augie was missing a chunk of that journey for me. He seemed like a stereotypical male protagonist, so it was especially difficult to empathize with him. His state in the beginning of the novel before he embarked on his journey was punctuated by internal thoughts like this one:
“In his dreams he was a still-young man just beginning to fall in love with himself. He was growing more and more certain that he could, should, have whatever he wanted. He was smart, and ambitious, and destined for greatness.”
He has shallow occasional asides about the role of women in his life and his “clinical” inability to love, treating them as research subjects and
“enjoy[ing] the variety of bodies, different breasts and bellies and legs to explore when he needed a break from his research, but that was all.”
Augie certainly came around as a person, but in a different way than Sully. His final scene both catered to my love of ambiguous and open endings but also solidified my belief that Augie got the shorter end of the stick in the novel. Considering how frequently his sexual escapades were mentioned and the way in which women were described, often in an unnamed, body part-related or clinical manner, I was tempted to approach Augie’s situation as a kind of cosmic karma, similar to the “hero’s journey” or the “fairytale curse” that the (often male) protagonist encounters because of his incorrect ways. I didn’t have the same sort of reaction with Sully, who had clearly made her choice and was coming to terms with it over the course of the novel, where nature served as the facilitator for reflection rather than the conditional punishment.
Another fault, albeit a minor one, that I couldn’t help noticing was the inaccuracy of some of the questionable scientific details. Granted, most people will not notice this and will enjoy the novel as it is, but as an individual with two engineers for parents (who are baffled by the popularity of scientifically inaccurate movies like Gravity, Interstellar, and Passengers), these were things that I couldn’t help but make a mental note of. The seemingly endless abundance of food supplies both in the Arctic and onboard the spaceship. The apparent omission of a lag in communication between Earth and The Aether toward the end. The spaceship’s seemingly unproblematic docking to the ISS. Regardless of whether these were accurate or not, these moments should be thought of as little notes going “heads up!” for readers who may be interested in such things. For me, it was a testament to the compelling nature of Brooks-Dalton’s prose that I could let these little nuances slip by without interfering with the plot, just as my wish that she would have given a bit more information about the war / cataclysm was more of a passing fancy that ultimately proved unnecessary for Good Morning, Midnight to be a fantastic novel.
This is a book one should read carefully from beginning to end in order to appreciate fully everything Brooks-Dalton does with the plot and the characters. The vague endings of both Augie’s and Sully’s stories were perfectly satisfactory to me, and I would argue that the novel was more concerned with building a frame to house the moral and human questioning than it was with providing a resolution for them in the form of a clear wall label. While the novel isn’t perfect, these imperfections added a humanizing quality to it that made me enjoy it even more, changing my opinion on certain parts of it that would have otherwise been bothersome under the talents of a lesser writer. Brooks-Dalton opened up the science-fiction genre, making it accessible without taking away from either the emotional power of the situation or from the compelling scientific and philosophical side. Good Morning, Midnight captures and transmits to its reader the
“all-consuming one-directional romance with the emptiness and the fullness of the entire universe [in which] [t]here was no room to spare, no time to waste on a lesser lover.”
