The title Percival’s
Planet would indicate that the discovery of Pluto in 1930, or
perhaps Percival Lowell’s unsuccessful earlier search doe his Planet
X, is the focus of the novel, and, ostensibly, it is. Clyde Tombaugh,
who discovered Pluto, is a major character and his discovery does play a
climactic role, but the main part of the book focuses on Michael
Byers’s fictitious characters, the astronomer-mathematician, Alan
Barber, the insane Mary Hempstead, and the dinosaur-hunting millionaire
Felix DuPrie.
Each
of Byers’s characters have their own stories. Barber is working as a
mathematician at the Lowell Observator prior to Tombaugh’s arrival.
His infatuation with a friend’s fiancée leads to his very public
disgrace, which he tries to banish by revisiting Lowell’s calculations
and attempting to more accurately predict a position for Planet X. At
first, Hempstead’s story seems completely unrelated to the main
narrative as she deals with her homosexual brother, Hollis, and the
delusion that a large horn extrudes from her head. Eventually, she
travels to Arizona, where her story meshes with those of Barber and
DuPrie. DuPrie, meanwhile, is the neer-do-well millionaire heir to an
arms fortune whose quest for dinosaur fossils is an attempt to redeem
his image and serves as a mirror for both Tombaugh’s quest for Pluto
and Barber’s pursuit for redemption.
The
most problematic character in the novel is Clyde Tombaugh, as well as
the others based on historical figures.
I found myself having problems reconciling the fictionalized
version of Tombaugh with the individual I knew for several years in the
1980s, although unlike Byers’s creations, his version of Tombaugh is
one of the few sympathetic characters in the book.
Interestingly, the least sympathetic character, the closest the
novel comes to a villain, is Byers’s portrayal of Constance Lowell,
although she comes across with a level of accuracy based on what
Tombaugh, Slipher, and others have written about her.
The
book’s tempo is slow as Byers focuses on his characters. Combined with
their generally unsympathetic nature, the pace leaves the reader
plodding through the novel, not caring about the characters’ successes
and set-backs. Even Tombaugh’s eventual discovery come as
anticlimactic as the reader knows Pluto will be discovered. The
discovery also leads Byers into a debate that presages the 2005-6 debate
over Pluto’s status, further destroying the wonder of the moment and
portraying Tombaugh, V.M. Slipher, etc. as flim-flam artists rather than
scientists.
While
Pluto’s nature has long been contentious, the arguments presented in Percival’s
Planet are anachronistic when viewed in the discussion of various
historical controversies as presented in William Hoyt’s Planets
“X” and Pluto or Tombaugh’s own Out
of the Darkness: The Search for Pluto.
Byers has taken and interesting and unique moment and
built a story around it which doesn’t live up to the focus of the
story. He introduces interesting, and perhaps even clever, story
elements, but they never coalesce to the level of the actual historical
events Byers uses, ultimately undercutting the historical elements which
almost appear as an unnecessary afterthought the Byers’s story of
Barber, Hempstead, and DuPrie.
