Good Morning, Midnight

“Good Morning, Midnight” (2016) is a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel by US writer Lily Brooks-Dalton. As she puts it, the book:

“poses the question of what truly matters in the end – what is important.”

Emily Dickinson provided the title in one of her poems:

Good Morning — Midnight
I’m coming Home
Day — got tired of Me
How could I — of Him?

George Clooney made the book into a Hollywood film: “The Midnight Sky” (2020), now on Netflix, starring George Clooney and Felicity Jones.

Our story: We follow two scientists, a man at an Arctic research station, and a woman on Aether, a spaceship (with a crew of five) returning from Jupiter. They are both so cut off from the rest of mankind that they are spared its sudden demise in 2049 (the film gives a date, the book does not). They endlessly search the radio waves to find a human voice, someone, anyone, who is still alive. In the end they find – only each other.

“We study the universe in order to know, yet in the end the only thing we truly know is that all things end – all but death and time. It’s difficult to be reminded of that […] but it’s harder to forget.”

Hollywood: George Clooney took this bleak, philosophical book, gave it a heroic hero (played by him), a happy ending (as happy as things can reasonably get post-apocalypse), cranked up the suspense to nerve-wracking levels (complete with an airlock countdown that was added) – and ditched the title’s Emily Dickinson reference. But despite Clooney’s best efforts, it still has a beautiful, tear-jerker surprise ending, it still makes you wonder about life.

A musk ox (Ovibos moschatus) on Ellesmere Island, April 1st 2016 (via Outdoor Photographer).

The Arctic: In the book, the Arctic is played by northern most part of the northern most island in Canada, Ellesmere Island, at the edge of the Arctic Ocean. The end of the world at the end of the world, in other words. But it is a place of life, of polar bears, hares, wolves, wildflowers, zillions of birds – and musk oxen:

“They looked ancient, almost prehistoric – as if they’d been grazing here long before humans had stood on two legs and would continue to graze long after the cities built by men and women crumbled back into the earth.”

In the film, the Arctic is played by Iceland. It is a place of snow and wind and wolves. Nature as obstacle, not nature as context. But to the film’s credit, a part was filmed during an actual blizzard (winds 80 kph, temperature -40 °C).

The stars: Brooks-Dalton is also better at placing man among the stars, though the film does have a gorgeous view of the Milky Way as seen from space. On Earth, something like a third of mankind cannot see the Milky Way at night because of all the city lights.

On second viewing, I did not get much more out of the film. A bad sign. But the book seems like the kind that will grow on me.

– Abagond, 2021.

See also:

• books – books I read in 2021
• Hollywood
• Blade Runner – also about the film and the book
• Virtual Travel: Cape Town to the North Pole

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