“Viewed from this side of the Moon, the hundred billion stars of the Milky Way were not so much points of light as a glowing fabric, twisting and folding around a dense, bright center.”

This Kingdom Of Dust is the second novel by Australian teacher and author, David Dyer. Anyone born before about nineteen-sixty-six will have the moon landing engraved into their brain along with a few other historical events they’ve lived through. David Dyer takes that well-known tale and adds a little wrinkle that makes an already fascinating story downright dramatic.

The story is told through five narratives (the blurb a bit misleading on that point), and essentially starts when astronauts Neil and Buzz are about to land on the surface of the moon. Later, it’s time to rendezvous with the command module Columbia, but things keep impeding their successful ascent: something fairly easily remedied at first, then increasingly complex glitches that make it more and more likely that they will be stranded on that dry, dusty surface until they die.

From Buzz’s perspective, there’s the danger but also the beauty of the moon, particularly seductive when he’s experiencing hypoxia: “He paused awhile to marvel again at the Moon’s uncompromising purities: her blazing white, her deep black, her utter stillness, her perfect vacuum. It was mesmerising, and he began to feel a strong desire to climb down the ladder and lie down to sleep in her soft ground” and later “But how could he ever leave this place? The Moon was a warm cocoon in a cold darkness, and he could hear her again whispering to him, as she had before. ‘Why not stay forever?’”

We see the emotional lows and highs, the predictable despondency and the incredible euphoria as each new problem is revealed and potentially solved. Also fluctuating are the beliefs and doubts about what Buzz is being told.

Back in Houston, Aquarius, journalist and author of several novels in which he seems to compulsively yoking together of the lofty and the obscene, carries the burden of what he admits is a lousy, dirty, cowardly crime in his past.

Now, he has been offered a lucrative publishing deal by Life magazine to write about the machines that get these men to the moon and back. He has a contact in the Grumman company which built the Lunar Module, the lem, but he’s more interested in the people, something assigned to Dodie, another writer. As events unfold, he’s planted himself in the Buzz’s home, where he focuses on Joan, former actress, now wife and mother of three: he’s convinced that she’s the real story.

These two narratives are interspersed with observations on the whole scenario from Mike in the command module as he orbits the moon waiting for Neil and Buzz to return. He gets to see what few others ever will: “The sun had sunk below the horizon behind him, but Earth remained, so that he beheld a sight no other human could see: the Moon illuminated only by earthlight. The vast basalt seas now appeared to be enveloped in aquamarine mists, and the sapphire tints of the canyons and craters had deepened to rich turquoise.”

In past interviews, he’d been asked about what would happen if the lunar module couldn’t get back up, something for which he had eighteen protocols. Will he now have to leave his fellow space travellers behind?

The reader only gets Joan’s point of view in two chapters near the end of the story, ditto Neil’s contribution in part of the penultimate chapter. But Dyer does give his astronauts plenty of gorgeous descriptive prose: “This was the part of the orbit in which the Columbia could be her most perfect self: a glorious cathedral, lit from within by her instrument lights glowing like candles, and from without by a splendid array of starlight. Below him the stars were blotted out by the Moon, black and brooding, but above they burned like a celestial furnace” is just one example.

Dyer easily evokes his era and setting, and the final twist is excellent. Clever and thought-provoking, this is another David Dyer winner.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Penguin Random House Australia.

David Dyer’s first novel was the excellent retelling of the Titanic story – The Midnight Watch. Now, eight years later, he returns with a novel that delves into another major global event – the Moon landing. And while this one was not originally a tragedy, Dyer’s This Kingdom of Dust explores the question – what if it was?
This Kingdom of Dust tells the story of Apollo 11, the first manned landing on the Moon, and explores what might have happened if the lunar lander could not return to Earth. Dyer has two main frames of reference for this story. The first is Buzz Aldrin, second in command to Neil Armstrong. And the second is a journalist called Aquarius (a stand in for Norman Mailer) who has been employed by Life magazine to write about the Moon landing from a technical perspective but is more interested in writing about Aldrin’s wife Joan.
Dyer’s version of events follows actual history up until the Moon landing itself. Then things start to go wrong. The lunar lander cannot take off and neither the astronauts themselves nor mission control can find a technical fix. Dyer stays with Buzz and Neil as they work through all of their options and have to them work through a series of protocols for this situation developed by Mission Control (these actually existed). On Earth, Aquarius is trying to find a way to get closer to Joan, but also finds himself with Madalyn, a forceful atheist who has been campaigning for NASA to be a religion-free organisation. Joan herself has to keep up the front of a loyal astronaut’s wife while also trying to find a way to help Buzz in any way she can.
Dyer uses his characters and their circumstances to explore some interesting thematic territory. He looks at the role of religion and the intersect between religion and science, he explores the life of the astronaut wives, who had to put their lives on hold and find themselves being part of the NASA PR machine. And he looks at the way in which people deal with and process impending tragedy. He is particularly interested in the relationships between Buzz and Neil and between Aquarius and Joan as this tragedy plays out.
Unfortunately, in the end, Dyer pulls his punches a little. The public failure of the Moon landing would have had significant political ramifications for the United States and the space program as a whole. Some other alternate fiction – For All Mankind – has gone some way to exploring a different future for the space program. But by ending where he does and how he does, Dyer falls short of exploring those potential ramifications of his scenario. But this is a minor quibble as what Dyer does deliver is a thought provoking alternate history that explores a number of universal issues through the eyes of a group of fascinating characters.

In David Dyer’s first book, The Midnight Watch, he explores a machine that went wrong and uses an incredible amount of research to put forth a plausible theory as to why The Californian did not go to the Titanic’s aid the night she sunk into the Atlantic Ocean. It’s one of my favourite books, not because it sparked an obsession with the Titanic disaster, but because Dyer’s narrative is just so beautiful and emotive. It puts you in that water right along those boats.

In This Kingdom of Dust, Dyer turns this on its head and explores a machine that, in reality went right, but fictionalises the micro and macro ramifications of ‘what-if’ it went wrong.

The 1969 moon landing is quite possibly the world’s biggest moment in history. ‘One giant leap for mankind’ is a phrase that many of us in adulthood know well, regardless of whether we were alive to watch it back then or not. The Apollo program was huge and despite its failures - it put 2 men on the moon. But the thing is, despite some hiccups, the mission was a success.
Buzz and Neil landed on the moon, did an EVA, and then the Lunar Module lifted them off the Moon to reunite with Mike in the Columbia, and they all returned to Earth as heroes.

But, what if it didn’t. What if something - a single point of failure - failed, and there was no way to fix it?

Dyer shows his excellent research skills once more and through the eyes of a fictional journalist named Aquarius (a nod to Norman Mailer), Buzz, his wife Joan, and Neil, the reader explores such a failure and learns about the human, mechanical, and humanity reactions to a moon landing disaster, or more accurately a moon ascension disaster and the very real Protocol/contingency - Unbeknownst to many - for this very event. And let me assure you, it was no The Martian/Mark Watney ‘Bring him Home’ moment.

Hearing Dyer talk about this book at the recent Queenscliffe Literary Festival, it became clear that he added numerous parallels, symmetries, and positions but the one that resonates with me the most is the hopelessness, of slowly suffocating - as an astrowife and deprived of oxygen - and there’s nothing that anyone can do about it.

Many thanks to David Dyer, Penguin Random House Australia, and NetGalley for an arc of this fascinating historical fiction story. I eagerly await to see what after comes up with next.