Percival's Planet: A Novel

  • Michael Byers
Henry Holt: 2010. 432 pp. $27 9780805092189 | ISBN: 978-0-8050-9218-9

Eighty years ago, the hunt for a mysterious Planet X culminated in the discovery of Pluto. Lying beyond Neptune in the Solar System, the orb was named after the Greek god of the underworld and became part of our family of nine planets. In 2006, having completed just one-third of an orbit around the Sun since its detection, Pluto was declared a mere 'dwarf planet', an interloper from deep space, and was cast out of that family.

Clyde Tombaugh rose from humble origins to discover Pluto. Credit: AP PHOTO

Percival's Planet is novelist Michael Byers's fictionalized history of the discovery. Interweaving real people and events with imagined ones in a pastiche of the United States in the late 1920s, he tells the (real) tale of Planet X — an unseen planet at the Solar System's edge that had been predicted by wealthy businessman-turned-astronomer Percival Lowell to explain anomalies in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus. Into the search for the putative planet steps Clyde Tombaugh, working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, which Lowell had endowed. After Tombaugh's efforts pay off, Planet X is renamed Pluto by a schoolgirl who wins a competition.

Tombaugh's story of serendipity frames the novel. A farmer's son from Kansas, he was a skilled technician and a self-taught maker of telescopes. In the novel, he shares the stage with a bewildering array of characters, from Harvard astronomers to fading boxers, confused heirs and beautiful women, both sane and insane. All these actors orbit ever closer to the Lowell Observatory, perturbing each other more and more until they collide. Byers's portrayal of the United States on the cusp of the Great Depression is meticulous; glimpses of inner dialogue and period details help build an immersive world.

The true story of Pluto's discovery is here, but it is slow to come to the fore. And the mix of fact and fiction can be unsettling. Fabricated characters crucial to the story coexist with real people such as Tombaugh, his fellow astronomer Vesto Slipher and Lowell's widow. Many readers will find themselves turning to Google for information about what is true and what is not.

Byers's choice of embellishment over historic accuracy is understandable because the search for Planet X involved countless hours of drudgery: meticulous astronomical observation, long periods staring at photographic plates and uneventful book keeping. In real life, cool discoveries are often made by normal people who then just go home and have tea. By adding flesh and blood to the true story of Pluto, Byers reinvigorates its history.

Like witnessing men walking on the Moon 40 years later, finding Pluto was a milestone in the lives of a generation. It came at a pivotal moment when human horizons expanded. The discovery coincided with the birth of modern cosmology, when the vast scale of the Universe was revealed, and when improved global communications meant that a crash on Wall Street reverberated around the world. Science was changing too, becoming more professional. Yet the pace of investigation remained genteel: researchers could take their time on speculative projects such as the hunt for Planet X. This wider context makes Byers's imagined tale of real science more compelling.

Percival's Planet ends before Tombaugh's death, a graceful effort to avoid Pluto's miserable — albeit scientifically justified — demotion. But there is a neat coda to the tale. Some of Tombaugh's ashes are now on board the New Horizons mission to that distant, frigid dwarf planet. Speeding through the outer planets, his ashes will arrive in 2015 at the speck caught by his sharp eye a lifetime ago. Not bad for a farmer's boy from Kansas.