He is an untutored mechanic with a genius for designing and directing the V-2 rocket program in Germany. The best-drawn of these families are a scientist and his wife who come to the US with Wernher von Braun. A third is a young athlete who becomes one of America's first straight-arrow astronauts. Another is a US Senator serving on the powerful Space Committee. One is a dedicated researcher who sacrifices everything for space exploration. His focus here is not on the land and traditions of a given region, but rather on the people - the husbands, wives, and children - who were most affected by the space effort.įour families dominate the reader's attention. The crucial decision to get into the action right away tells us something about this book that's different from other Michener novels.
Instead, he moves to the last days of World War II and the men who had the early vision and professional promise to shape the American program in space. That would have given us a familiar Michener beginning. So he might have opened this novel with a picture of planets and suns hurling through a million miles of emptiness. There is a brooding presence of landscape, a Hardyesque sense of determinism subjecting even the strongest of his people to a fate beyond their control. Locale, therefore, dominates the action of his story and the development of character, a tendency indicated by the titles of his major novels. Whether his subject is Hawaii, the American West, or Chesapeake Bay, he lays out a virgin land and through a sometimes labored process of accretion fills it with people, customs, and objects.
Michener's point of origin is the beginning of things.
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