LARRY BUTTROSE Everyone on Mars. Reviewed by Sue Woolfe

Not just astronauts and science experiments: Larry Buttrose’s stories imagine what it would be like if we had to live on Mars.

One of the most memorable opening lines in fiction is Ford Maddox Ford’s ‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard.’ The Good Soldier is subtitled ‘A Tale of Passion’ – ‘tale’ implying a discursive telling and an unreliable narrator.But a new, tiny Australian book of short, amusing, even rollickingly funny stories told by a reliable though idiosyncratic narrator, tells a far sadder story.

Into our very perception of our planet’s landscape, with its hospitable air and water and soil, is folded aeons of human understanding – of life and death, hope and despair – all our cultural, intellectual and spiritual understanding of what it means to be alive on this planet. In the wastelands of Mars, we’re not reflected in any way – there is not only no history, no culture, no humans, but the actual air, water and soil – the planet itself – is totally inhospitable. Humans must be suited up and helmeted merely to go outside – and then be protected by a vehicle – all to withstand the hostility of a planet we are not made for. Why then would one go? To conquer it? In these stories, the answer seems to be for mineral wealth alone.

Larry Buttrose’s book depicts a society on Mars that must necessarily pay much attention to ‘wellness’ because, as one character says: ‘vulnerable people are even more so here … There’s nothing here but some minerals under its surface.’ This is evidenced when a seismic engineer, facing a suddenly deranged, knife-wielding colleague, realises the effect of Mars on those around her:

The unknown terrain of an alien world, and the equally unknown terrains of their own minds … In the end, the demons were your own and you had to face them yourself.

On the other hand, when a poet laureate illegally escapes from the severely limited tourist route, he ecstatically sees the ideal of Mars, the same ideal a character in a joke shop envisages in a later story and would give his eye teeth to experience:

A place naked of life, stripped even of atmosphere, in every sense … Without life to screw it up, the universe was overwhelming, commanding, brilliant. These orange-red rock-strewn plains of nothing, these mad gargantuan mountains with no one to stand on them, barren skies that fled before the eyes … it was pure and exquisite as it was eternal …

Buttrose’s society is a pining expatriate society; stoutly and unashamedly articulate, educated and erudite, self-determined, clear-thinking and ready to explore their feelings.

In the first story, a writer-in-residence – part of the settlement’s attempt at ‘wellness’ – loves and needs the company of ‘real books’ despite the weight and space they take up in the ship. Electronic books ‘lack the authority and truth of print stamped into paper, something you can touch and hold and that will never alter.’

Another equally self-possessed character, the seismic scientist whose male colleague suddenly attacks her, is entirely believable when, rational in the moment of near-death, she reasons that Mars brings out ‘the worst in many of its inhabitants’. This story in particular set my heart racing. Buttrose, a writer’s writer, knows how to make a story hum. Afterwards, I asked myself why I believed a character could be so rational at knife-point – would I be rational? – and I think my answer is the strength, no, the force of the writing. We’re carried along.

In another story a young shift-worker becomes ‘a kind of existentialist Martian rebel’ who finally gives up useless (and amusing) acts of vandalism, such as arranging rocks to spell out ‘Fuck Mars’, and instead writes his memoirs and delivers them to the writer in residence. Of course, since this is a story – another good one – of all the writing submitted by the Mars population to the writer, his is the best ever. However, after his shift’s end he escapes the confines of his group, takes himself to a summit, removes his helmet, lies down and dies, smiling with relief. All the time we read on, knowing half-consciously that this is an artificial society, not only in the sense that any human encampment on Mars must be artificial, but that it’s an authorial creation, the world the author wants to dwell in. Nevertheless, this reader at least was entirely convinced.

Partly my credulity was won by the witty, jagged storytelling, where the unexpected but totally credible happens before our astonished eyes – for instance, when a baroness rolls on the floor fighting with her servant over possession of a manuscript, the one she’s been sent to Mars to write – in front of a reporter from The Guardian who is, deliciously, for he’s entirely gormless, a distant relative of the great African writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o; a couple who, on their last night together on Earth before the woman departs to be a psychiatrist on Mars, decide to get married, and to confirm their sacred union go to a joke shop to buy rings; a lonely housewife, her husband sent temporarily back to Earth, is intent on fastidiously banishing every reminder of the ‘yellow’ Mars in her boudoir by bedecking it in shades of blue – ‘navy, sky, electric, turquoise, cornflower, periwinkle, ultramarine, midnight, IKB’ – in between exhausting bouts of drunkenness and masturbation; a PR writer on a nine-month cruise to Mars takes as a lover a dancer in the entertainment troupe and when a virus takes the lives of all on board, she dies in a naked dance of death on stage, kicking him in the front row of the audience, and he is the only person to reach Mars alive.

These are vivacious stories, artfully crafted.

But perhaps more importantly, my credulity was won by Buttrose’s images, which seem to delve into a common cultural understanding of our home planet. The housewife buying blue wallpaper is served in a shop by an assistant with a face like a rooster, who points out during the conversation that she’ll need blue bed linen. ‘With that he did his small fowl smile and she wondered if the drumstick would come away easily from the carcass.’ (I’m not sure how the drumstick relates to his face, but I laughed aloud in recognition.) A printed book is as ‘silent and motionless as a cat on a shelf’. A young woman has a mouth ‘like a fresh strawberry’. A woman remarks on the colour of a man’s tie as being ‘like a distant sky before dusk’. A man entering the house of a woman he desires sees ‘a sofa you could laze your life away on’. Because of their originality, we not only apprehend these images of ‘Our beautiful cripple, the Earth’, as he calls it, but yearn for more, and read on.

The stories are told by a dependable narrator, a traditional puppeteer who lurks behind the text, unashamedly erudite in matters of literature and film, just as the characters of his society are. Contemporary fiction often eschews literary and classic film references but they are entirely appropriate to the ruminations of these characters – so, still under the spell of the writing, this reader, swept along by the sheer narrative force, took pleasure in looking up, for example, John Betjeman, to discover his comic verse; recalled (though slowly) the short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’; and discovered Slim Pickens in Blazing Saddles, and Josephine Baker.

The credibility of Buttrose’s creation is tested by the penultimate story, ‘Science Fiction’, the longest and most ambitious. A historian reports the machinations on Earth that follow when a tiny piece of Martian ‘slime’ is controversially brought to Earth, where it is discovered to be toxic, and multiplies to spread over Earth’s landmass. Hysterical populations and politicians instead of scientists take control of the world’s response, and it is a testament to the author’s gender agnosticism that we entirely believe his female Donald Trump look-alike as she incites the uninformed masses to instigate what inevitably becomes the utter destruction of Earth, so that Earth’s inhabitants are forced to leave for Mars. The reader thinks for a moment and nods soberly. It could happen.

Buttrose shows little interest in the scientists and engineers, the maintenance workers, medical staff, computer experts, biologists and botanists that the finding of mineral wealth on Mars requires, though there are mentions of them socialising in a never explored ‘Mess’: such people, drawn to Mars because of their research interests, could’ve provided a more nuanced view of Mars – somewhere between the baroness’s ‘nothing here’ and the poet laureate’s ‘pure and exquisite’. Certainly their research would add to the sum of human knowledge and could greatly improve life on Earth. But this little book would still ask, if one day we might lose the Earth and had to live somewhere else, could we deal with that terrible, eternal bereavement?

Buttrose’s book quietly but unflinchingly argues his thesis so that the reader puts the book down with an emotionally charged conviction: it would be monstrously unbearable to lose this beautiful planet, our perfect home. We cannot let this happen. This would be the saddest story.

Larry Buttrose Everyone on Mars Puncher and Wattman 2024 PB 150pp $29.95

Sue Woolfe is the author of four novels, including the award-winning Leaning Towards Infinity and the collection of stories Do You Love Me Or What? She has a doctorate in creativity and neuroscience and teaches at NIDA and ANU.

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Tags: Australian writers, colonisation, Larry | Buttrose, Mars, wellness, writers-in-residence