Ian Mond Reviews Oh God, The Sun Goes by David Connor

Oh God, The Sun Goes, David Connor (Melville House 978-1-68589-062-9, $18.99, 240pp, tp) August 2023.

With its intriguing title, striking all-black cover marred by an iridescent circle (where the title sits) and absurdist conceit, David Connor’s de­but feels like it has been marketed just for me. I love nothing more than an unabashedly weird and experimental story, and Oh God, The Sun Goes fits that bill, an adventure in unfiltered sur­realism that sets out to disorientate the reader. As much as I embraced the dreamlike setting and cast of eccentric characters, however, all that unadulterated weirdness distracted me from the novel’s themes about love and loss.

From the opening sentence, it’s revealed that the sun has disappeared and in its place:

There’s a spot in the sky where it should be, a hollowed out circle that’s sort of grey, like the absence of light – not darkness, different kind of absence – in a way, it’s brighter than if the sun were there, mote blinding even. Blinding grey absence in the sky.

Our unnamed narrator (at one point, he’s referred to as Mr. Blue) is on a road trip to find the sun. He heads to the retirement village of Sun City in Arizona, where he hopes to meet Dr Higley, an expert in helioseismology – ‘‘the study of the sun and its seismic movements’’ – who, according to reports, knows where the sun has gone. As it transpires, our narrator’s encounter with Dr Higley – who sleeps with an egg on his forehead and hasn’t woken since the sun vanished – is the first step on a bizarre, hallucinogenic journey through a distorted, mirror-image version of Arizona and Phoenix. Along the way, our narrator will visit a museum devoted to real estate mogul Delbert ‘‘Del’’ Webb, track the location of a swarm of bumble bees, take a voyage, via train, through the brain, and make the devastating discovery that it’s not only the sun that’s gone but also our narrator’s lover, ‘‘M.’’

As a self-professed connoisseur of the sur­real, I’ve come to appreciate those novelists or short story writers who can balance emotional authenticity with the absurd. Robert Shearman is a master at this. He can tell a story about a newlywed woman who gives birth to furniture and have you care deeply about the loss she experiences when her offspring are sold. Hilary Leichter, John Elizabeth Stintzi, Samanta Schwe­blin, Hiro Kawakami, and Sayaka Murata are more recent examples of authors who have found that sweet spot between the nonsensical and the poignant. Unfortunately, that’s what I found missing from Oh God, The Sun Goes. While I most certainly loved the weirdness (which I will celebrate in just a moment), I was never in tune with the novel’s emotional core: the tragic love story between our narrator and M. I say this with the awareness that the disconnect I’m feeling re­flects the emotional disconnect between the two lovers. Our narrator remains in love with M, or at least the memory of her, whereas M (whom we do encounter) feels differently, having fallen out of love with Mr. Blue. ‘‘You saw this image you so desperately wanted me to be, this illusion of light I wasn’t.’’ The meeting between the narrator and M is a critical scene. But when surrounded by so much doubt and uncertainty – is this really M? Are we still trapped in a fractured version of the narrator’s mind – coupled with the fact that we know so little about these characters, I found it difficult to feel sympathy for either of them.

But if the novel left me cold emotionally, it delighted me intellectually. Connor delivers several vivid, outlandish set pieces, the highlight of which is when Tom and Pete, two individuals we meet briefly at a diner, erupt into a dance number. At the start of Mr. Blue’s narrative, the dance is mentioned in passing. Toward the end of the novel, acting as an appendix to the main action, we get the whole routine, in all its daz­zling choreography. It’s just marvellous. Not all the set pieces are this colourful, but they are this offbeat. There’s Higley and the egg on his fore­head, and there’s the fictional Del Webb’s plan of building his cookie-cutter retirement village, Sun City, on the sun’s surface, and there’s the train that stops at stations representing parts of the human brain. The bit of wonderful nonsense that stuck with me – dance number aside – was the woman who resides in the town of Bumble Bee, who spends her days either sketching bees or watching their activity through a hole drilled into the wall of her house, and yet who is deathly afraid of them. It’s the type of quirkiness that Hiro Kawakami pulls off so effectively in her work.

I acknowledge that there will be readers with a different attitude to surrealism who will embrace the elusive quality of Oh God, The Sun Goes. For me, though, it was confirmation that I like my absurdity to have a little more heart.

This review and more like it in the October 2023 issue of Locus.

While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT to continue quality coverage of the science fiction and fantasy field.

©Locus Magazine. Copyrighted material may not be republished without permission of LSFF.