Beachbooks 2: Dagnificent Messolation

For my second holiday read I gave in to the excitement surrounding the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and splashed out on Buzz Aldrin’s Magnificent Desolation. The book (co-written with Ken Abraham) tells of the aftermath of his visit to our dusty satellite.

I have long been a fan of the moon landings, having been just about old enough to realise what was happening in the later lunar missions in the early seventies. It confirmed me as a space-nut. Though the enthusiasm of childhood has waned a little, I “loved”:http://network.nature.com/people/scurry/blog/2008/12/28/imagine-there's-no-earth the recent and enthralling In the Shadow of the Moon documentary, which was built around detailed interviews with most of the Apollo astronauts, all of whom spoke candidly and came across as thoughtful and charming. Each seemed the sort of bloke you’d be happy to bump into in a pub. But I’d read that Aldrin had succumbed to alcoholism on his return to earth and was intrigued to know more. I thought it would be interesting to explore the dark side of the moon, as a counterpoint to all the froth of the anniversary.

Colonel Buzz Aldrin (from Wikipedia)

The story starts promisingly, with a brief, breezy account of the Apollo 11 mission, but then disater strikes and it breaks into pieces like a capsule with a faulty heat-shield. You are left gazing quizzically at a bunch of smoking fragments, with little hope of re-assembling them into the original unit. I was bitterly disappointed, the bad taste accentuated by the sense that there was a great story lurking behind the shambolic tale told by Aldrin and his co-author.

That story clearly has some fantastic elements – the astronauts’ amazing journey, the world-wide adulation on their return, the undercurrent of rivalry with Armstrong, Aldrin’s struggle with normalisation after leaving NASA, his descent into depression and alcoholism, the marital infidelities and break-up, his brief experience as a Cadillac salesman (a bad one) and the long, slow climb back to a sense of equilibrium and happiness in his third marriage. But from this silk purse of riches Aldrin and Abraham somehow only manage to turn out a sow’s ear.

I think the problem is with the writing – it is far too bland. I don’t know how the book was put together but I couldn’t escape the impression that the co-writer Abraham was putting words in Aldrin’s mouth and thoughts in his head. It didn’t feel real, and that was a huge problem for me. Aldrin’s tale is told candidly enough – he admits his infidelity and recognises the terrible pain that he inflicted on his first wife and their children. And he is pretty frank about facing up to depression and alcoholism; on this score he was well ahead of his peer group back in the early ’70s and took considerable risks with his reputation. But the episodes that plot the path of dreadful decline are too cliché-ridden to pack much punch. There’s simply not enough brutality to the honesty.

And there’s a lack of telling detail. The ups and downs of Aldrin’s ten-year battle with drink and depression, helped by various partners and therapists, is recounted at length but the narrative doesn’t bear close analysis. The heart of the story is missing — the events are there but there’s no real access to his thoughts and feelings. I still can’t fathom why in 1978 he finally decided to give up the bottle and has been able — happily — to stay the course.

I managed to finish Magnificent Desolation, but only thanks to my long-standing devotion to the Apollo missions. The last third of the book was a rather dull grind through Aldrin’s wooing of his third wife, Lois, and his attempts to re-vitalise NASA’s interest in missions to the moon and Mars.

Buzz Aldrin remains a hero for me. I know I’d love to meet him in a bar and shoot the breeze — over a mineral water. But I’m afraid I don’t think I’ll be reading any more of his books.

And this brings me finally to Thomas Henry Huxley who, though he lived a century before Aldrin, leapt off the page full of vibrant life in Adrian Desmond’s truly magnificent biography…

(to be continued)