Vonne Gut Reactions: The Sirens of Titan

We continue to roll along with the second of Kurt Vonnegut's novels: The Sirens of Titan.

As I've mentioned before, spoilers abound.

You have been warned...

• First, a quick summary of the plot...Malachi Constant is rich through no efforts of his own. Winston Niles Rumfoord is a wealthy man who through a MacGuffin of space travel - a chrono-synclastic infundibulum - which shifts Rumfoord's existence into a wavefunction, manifesting in different locations at different times as well as seeing his past, present and future. Rumfoord tells Malachi and Beatrice (Rumfoord's wife) their futures, and though both do everything in their power to stop it from coming true, both march toward their future exactly as Rumfoord forsees, taking part in an invasion of Earth from Mars, stopping on Mercury, living on Mars, and eventually returning to die on Earth.
• There's a strong similarity here between the world view of Rumfoord - all future events have already taken place, there's no reason to fight them - and that of Billy Pilgrim (from Slaughterhouse Five) once he becomes unstuck in time. It's a semi-convenient conceit that removes any sort of guilt or responsibility from any of their actions. It means that all of Rumfoord's actions - uniting the people of Earth, leading an attack on Earth from Mars, manipulating Malachi's mind and entire future - aren't anything that we can blame on him. Everything that he's done has been - according to his view of the past and future already having happened - pre-ordained. He's not to be blamed. For some reason in Slaughterhouse Five this didn't bother me - maybe because Billy never acts immorally. Rumfoord, on the other hand, seems to manipulate nearly every single person on Earth. He destroys the idea of religion; kidnaps some people of Earth, brainwashes them, and send them to die attacking Earth. None of this seems too moral and everything, so I want to blame Rumfoord - but I can't because his actions have already happened, even his lying about Malachi's future.
• The Tralfamadorians make an appearance here for the first time in Vonnegut's oeuvre. Yay!
• Last time we checked in on Vonnegut, Calen had asked whether Vonnegut's female character would develop to be any more three-dimensional. Well, I'm not thinking this book is going to help Vonnegut's case with Calen. There's only one female character in the whole book, and she's pretty much entirely passive, letting the action happen around her. Beatrice certainly isn't passing the Bechdel test any time soon. Beatrice has married Rumfoord out of duty and not love. She gets abducted to Mars. She has a kid by Constant but doesn't love Malachi. She returns to Earth with her son through no initiative of her own. She heads to Titan because she's told she has to. She eventually falls in love with Malachi because he's the only one around. Wow...that's rich characterization. She's like a friggin' prop. There's no desire on her part; there's no impression that she's got any hopes or dreams other than briefly to resist the fickle hand of fate - and she fails miserably at that.
  
  Apparently we're still looking for Vonnegut's first rich female character. Maybe Mother Night will help us out.
• In the long run The Sirens of Titan is a road movie. Malachi's on Earth and gets told he's going to Mars, Mercury, and Titan. The entirety of the book is just a case of getting Malachi to Titan. It's actually a little reminiscent of the old road movies, too, because the characters don't seem to grow or change much along the way. Malachi opens without any direction and ends the same way. He heads to Mars and gets his brain sucked out of his head but doesn't gain any insight, doesn't become any more...well, any more anything. Malachi is at the whims of fate, and he doesn't seem to have taught us - or himself - anything what so ever. 
• If the characters don't change in any way and don't have anything to tell us, then they better be part of a pretty spectacular journey. Only they aren't. The stop over on Mars seems pretty pointless other than to have Malachi's brain wiped. The time on Mercury doesn't seem to change Malachi in any way other than to have him wander around in a cave pointlessly. The time on Titan seems pretty pointless, letting Malachi and Beatrice fall in love which is conveyed by them not living together, generally not liking each other, and sleeping together once every few months. If that's not love, what's going on?
• Calen hated the time on Mercury. I'll let her explain in the comments.
• There goes religion out the window at long last - long being two whole novels, though Player Piano wasn't exactly pro-religion, of course. Vonnegut was one of the world's more well-known secular humanists, and his anti-religion bent comes through loud and clear here as the entire point of the Mars (I won't say martian because the entire invasion force is displaced Earth humans - except for one human child born on Mars) is seemingly to destroy the religions of Earth, replacing them with the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, part of whose creed is "I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all." As Calen points out, however, the acceptance of a series of beliefs without proof is a religion whether it purports to explain creation or anything else is pretty much a religion. Looks like Vonnegut's destruction of religion seems to have created a new religion.
  
  Sort of defeats the purpose, eh?
• In the end the entire purpose to the actions in the book seems to be a set up by the Tralfamadorians to get a repair part to a spaceship that broke down on Titan. The ship's been broken down for more than 200,000 years, and Salo - the robot pilot headed for a distant galaxy. Turns out that the Tralfamadorians have been directing our society pretty much forever all with the goal of getting messages to Salo. Stonehenge, the Great Wall of China, the Kremlin - all directed by distant society on a distant planet to pass a message along. Of course, that had already happened in the future already. No reason to think they were being manipulative or mean. They were just doing the things they had already done in the future.
• When I passed the book along to Calen (see, I'm checking out two volumes of each of the books and passing one along to Calen, typically at school), one of the English teachers at our school raved about this book. It's apparently her favorite Vonnegut book ever.
  
  She's weird.
• Apparently, though, there are lots of people who love this book. Douglas Adams, according to Wikipedia, says The Sirens of Titan was a big influence on Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy:

  "Sirens of Titan is just one of those books – you read it through the first time and you think it's very loosely, casually written. You think the fact that everything suddenly makes such good sense at the end is almost accidental. And then you read it a few more times, simultaneously finding out more about writing yourself, and you realize what an absolute tour de force it was, making something as beautifully honed as that appear so casual."

• It's interesting that Vonnegut destroys religion after having one of his characters get filthy rich by following the first forty or so letters of the Bible.

Onward to Mother Night.

As I write this, however, I'm already a hundred-fifty pages into that one. With only two-hundred-two pages total in the book, this one shouldn't take much longer.