A Siren Voice

Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan has got to be the most extraordinary second novel written by anyone in terms of development from the first. Player Piano was a remarkably assured first novel, as I discovered on my recent re-reading, but all the ingredients that make Vonnegut Vonnegut come together by a kind of magic in his second. Indeed, I believe he has stated somewhere that the writing of Sirens seemed effortless. Yet there were false starts and roads never taken in between the writing of the two.

Certainly it was an effortless read, certainly for this reader, both when I first read it in the last century and over the last two days. This time round I kept thinking of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It had never occurred to me before just how much Adams owes Vonnegut. But there are two distinctive features of Vonnegut that put him in a different league, or, perhaps more properly put, give his fiction a depth that I don't think Adams would have ever aspired to. One is the American writer's sense of real menace in portrayals of violence. The comic nature of the utter failure of the Martian invasion of earth in the second novel doesn't stop it being genuinely disturbing. The second is the powerful sense of melancholy with which Vonnegut endows his characters. I can't think of a more straightforwardly sad writer, even though his characters are tissue thin. He seems to be able to capture the essential sense of loneliness and failure of us all, and then make us laugh at it.

I found myself moving on automatically in my Library of America edition of the early novels to Mother Night. I'm as happily addicted as I was when I was in my early teens.