Shooting the Sun

Rating:
Summary: An Unforgettable Adventure
Review: Byrd has created a thrilling story, rich with historical details and unexpected twists, and I had a hard time putting it down. This is a wonderfully crafted novel and one that continues to play in your imagination after the last page is read. TERRIFIC and highly recommended!!

Rating:
Summary: Great premise, but...
Review: In selecting as his subject a fictional trek across the early American West, Max Byrd took a step away from his habit of writing about presidents, as he did in Jefferson, Grant, and Jackson. It seems, however, that he's not as adept without the unifying theme of the great man.

The jacket copy convinced me to move this one to the top of my reading list--it's got Charles Babbage, the pre-computer computer-maker, eccentric extrordinaire, and a wild cast of characters. Babbage's business partner arranges for an expedition to, ostensibly, observe a solar eclipse which will, incidentally, prove the worth of Babbage's machine.

There's a great book in a premise like that one, but Byrd didn't write it. There's a lot about squabbling among the expeditioners; there's a lot about people convinced and unconvinced of Babbage's wisdom and his machine's value. Ultimately, the novel tries to cover so much--1830s Britain; early computing machines; 1830s Washington, D.C.; hostile Natives in the West--that Byrd's 300 pages can't cover it all. Another 100 pages may have been enough to make this a compelling historical novel; as it is, I strongly recommend reading Byrd's "Jackson" instead. It's a longer, more specific novel on roughly the same time period, and it's much more expertly executed.

Rating:
Summary: Slow and inaccurate
Review: Max Byrd's novel contains more research than drama, and unfortunately not all the research is accurate. At the end of Chapter 12 and the beginning of Chapter 13, he has his heroine Selena, a daguerrotypist accompanying an expedition to make a record of an eclipse in the southwestern US in 1839, make a demonstration of her work. She exposes her plate for ten minutes, which is accurate and then removes the copper plate from her camera, preparing to develop it. Unfortunately, the plate is miraculously transformed into a glass plate (not to appear in photography until the advent of ambrotypes, some years later)before the image is formed. I hoped very much to be informed and entranced by this book, with its cover blurbs promising involvement with Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, inventors of the first computer. Unfortunately, Babbage and Lovelace make only cameo appearances, and the novel's main characters tend to blur together, except for Selena, a product of a French father and American mother. The research was, as I say, ambitious but flawed.

Rating:
Summary: engaging and intriguing read
Review: Shooting the Sun follows a group in 1840 as they head out on the Santa Fe trail to try and photograph for the first time (actually a more advanced form of daguerreotype) a solar eclipse so as to prove the effectiveness of Charles Babbage's prototype "difference engine", an early "computer" used to predict the timing and place of the eclipse. The proof will then allow Babbage to garner more funds to continue to develop his early calculator. The group is made up of Selena Cott, the young female astronomer/photographer who must overcome the obvious hurdle of her gender; William Pryce, Babbage's financial adviser and a man who has his own reasons for coming along; the expert explorer who sees no place for a woman in the wild; the young artist who scoffs at photography's ability to do any more than capture the sterile surface; the expert astronomer who is threatened both by technology and feminism; and the gruff wagon leader who tries to get them to Santa Fe alive past rough frontier folk, prairie fires, hostile natives, equipment prone to breakdown, their own infighting, and the sheer lost loneliness of the west. Added to the mix in shifts of perspective and geography are Babbage himself as he wends his way through London society and finance and his uncle Richard, who is thought to be dead (though not officially meaning Babbage can't claim his estate) but is actually alive and living with the natives out west.
The characters are strongly portrayed in sharp human detail and grow with the book and their experiences, rather than remaining static creations. Relationships form and erode, trust is offered and broken, strengths and weaknesses are transformed. The journey itself is meticulously detailed and conveys both the sheer wonder and sheer terror of such a journey at the time. One understands clearly both the travails and the reward.
There is a rich mixture of personal conflict over culture, gender, generation, philosophy, sexuality, professionalism, and art. This, combined with the early hints that not everything is as it seems and that some of the characters are carrying secrets creates a wonderful tension throughout the entire work.
The book succeeds in many ways, as history, as travelogue, as character exploration, even as a mystery/suspense novel (though to a lesser extent). By the end, you're sorry to have the journey come to a close. A strong recommendation.