[easyazon-image align=”left” asin=”1620400065″ locale=”us” height=”333″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/419SoPuCIdL.jpg” width=”220″ alt=”Ken Kalfus” ]Of Martians and Men.
A Feature Review of
Equilateral: A Novel
Ken Kalfus
Hardback: Bloomsbury, 2013
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Reviewed by Erin Zoutendam
Ken Kalfus’s Equilateral is a weird and excellent little novel. The premise alone is enough to pique those with even the slightest native curiosity: After spotting what appear to be canals on the surface of Mars, late-nineteenth-century astronomer Sanford Thayer becomes convinced of the need to signal “incontrovertible proof of terrestrial intelligence” to the planet’s inhabitants (14). Thayer persuades the world’s investors, monarchs, and even schoolchildren to fund the project that he then pursues with Ahabian fury—the digging of a perfect equilateral triangle, over three hundred miles on a side, in the middle of the Egyptian desert. After hundreds of thousands of Arab peasants excavate the five-mile-wide trenches, they will be paved with pitch and filled with petroleum.
Then, sometime before dawn on June 17, 1894, at the moment of Earth’s most favorable position in the Martian sky, the petroleum pooled in the trenches on each side of the Equilateral will be ignited simultaneously, launching a Flare from the Earth’s darkened limb that across millions of miles of empty space will petition for man’s membership in the fraternity of planetary civilizations. (14)
Kalfus draws deeply from historical fact to plot his novel, and he effortlessly blends these facts into wildly speculative fiction. In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli drew a detailed map of Mars that included features called canali (“channels”), inevitably mistranslated into English as canals. Of course, the public largely assumed that the presence of canals implied intelligent construction. Though the canali turned out to be optical illusions, they had already imprinted themselves into popular imagination. (Indeed, Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet are two of the many books that riff on the possibility.) Kalfus also capitalizes on the extraordinary international cooperation that backed the construction of the Suez Canal just twenty-five years earlier, suggesting that the construction of the Equilateral could actually have been a reality.
Though Thayer’s triangle is to be perfect, its execution is mired in pitfalls. Money runs short, rumors of strikes abound, inevitable delays threaten, the astronomer takes ill. Soon another, more tenuous triangle emerges, a romantic one with Thayer’s indomitable secretary, Miss Keaton, at one base and the native serving girl, whom Thayer calls Bint, at the other. Though Miss Keaton possesses all the determination and self-assurance of Western civilization, she seems unable to match the mysterious attraction of Bint, who speaks not a word of English but whose eyes are on the stars.
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