The Sirens of Titan

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Kurt Vonnegut's second novel, The Sirens of Titan. I read this book back in college, and I picked it up again and re-read it this week. An advantage of getting old is that I almost completely forgot it, so reading it a second time was almost like reading it the first time.

I remembered only two things: a character becoming rich by investing in the stock market using a system derived from the Bible; and the book-within-a-book title "Unk and Boaz in the Caves of Mercury," which is so vivid that I've never forgotten it, even though I did forget who Unk and Boaz were.

In some ways this book perfectly crystallizes Vonnegut: it's outwardly a pulp science fiction novel, but inwardly a deeply humanistic look at mankind's struggle for meaning. The sci-fi is pretty slapdash, and has an almost childlike quality. A character named Winston Niles Rumfoord has built his own spaceship but gets caught in something called the Chrono-Synclastic Infundibula, which means he is in several places at once, appearing in various places throughout the solar system in regular intervals, along with his dog, Kazak. Rumfoord can see the past, present and future at the same time, and manipulates time to fulfill his own prophecies (the TV show Lost is sort of like this now).

Rumfoord invites the world's richest man, Malachi Constant, to visit on one of his appearances on Earth. Constant is told that he will end up visiting Mars, Mercury, and finally Titan, and that he will father a child by Rumfoord's wife, Beatrice, even though Constant takes an instant dislike to her. Of course all of this comes true, and Constant ends up part of a war between Mars and Earth that Rumfoord arranges so as to create peace and brotherhood on terra firma (an idea that also appears in the comic book epic Watchmen).

That's only part of the story. Late in the book a mechanical being from the planet Tralfamidore takes center stage (Tralfamidore would later play a big role in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five). Salo, as he is known, is quintessential Vonnegut, a creature that though a machine is terribly sentimental (think Epicac, his story about a computer who falls in love), and also combines the fantastic with the banal: he has been stranded on Titan, waiting for a replacement part for his spaceship. How long has he been waiting? 200,000 years.

The book is both marvelously zany and also heartbreakingly tender. Constant, who loses his fortune and is recruited to be a Martian soldier, becomes a kind of everyman, who is reduced to his simplest elements but still longs to be reunited with his family. Vonnegut satirizes a full range of Western concepts, whether they are business (his first novel, Player Piano, was also rooted in the financial), religion (Rumfoord creates a new one, the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent) and the military (the Martian army is really commanded by privates, who control the other soldiers through antennas in their brains).

As with all Vonnegut, though, this book puts forth the idea that no matter how insane our lives are, they are worthy, as is mankind in general. It is this book that Vonnegut, through the vile character of Rumfoord, says, "I can think of no more stirring symbol of man's humanity to man than a fire engine." And the ending, which is tough to read without getting a tear in the eye, allows Salo, a creature of technology, making the grandest gesture to a man of flesh and blood.

If I live long enough, I'll have to give this book another read in another twenty-five years. I'll be close to the age of Constant as he is at the end of the book, and I may have forgotten it all over again.