Searching for a theory of time
One of the more extraordinary aspects of the first moon landing was that the BBC chose to use David Bowie's Space Oddity in its coverage. It's a wonderfully haunting song, of course: a dialogue between ground control and Major Tom, as he sits far above the world in his tin can. But quite aside from the theory that the lyrics are really a parable about heroin use, what they describe is, in Nasa terms, a catastrophe: the circuit goes dead, contact is lost, and Major Tom - dreamily embracing his destiny - is left to float for ever in space.
Asked what he'd do if the lunar module malfunctioned in a similar way, Neil Armstrong was cagey: "Unpleasant thing to think about," he said.
Forty years on, it's easy to forget the apprehensions and superstitions of that time: the fear that the American space programme would be punished for its hubris, much as the Titanic had been, or that the astronauts would meet more than they'd bargained for (aliens, death rays, poison gases). Unease pervades the songs and films of the period: Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, for instance (which features a hostile onboard computer, Hal), the Creedence Clearwater Revival song Bad Moon Rising ("I see trouble on the way"), even Jonathan King's 1965 hit Everyone's Gone to the Moon. While science targeted the bright face of the moon, artists explored the shadowy craters. The theme of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon is madness.
Madness is also a running motif in the first major book about the Apollo 11 mission, Norman Mailer's Of a Fire on the Moon. Mailer was the perfect chronicler: who better to describe America's macho technocratic triumph? But his book is far from a love poem to Nasa. The astronauts unnerve Mailer because they are so cold and computerised, whereas to him there's something lunatic in the venture and in the events of that summer (Chappaquiddick, Woodstock, the Manson murders). For all its egotism, Of a Fire on the Moon brilliantly captures that "moon-crazy summer" - and at the end, Mailer is relieved to note that the first full moon after the landing is "more radiant with lunacy than ever".
WH Auden makes a similar observation in his poem Moon Landing, dismissing the Apollo mission as "a phallic triumph/ ... it would not have occurred to women/ to think worth while" but consoling himself that it has made no difference to the night sky: "Unsmudged, thank God, my Moon still queens the Heavens/ as She ebbs and fulls."
Among those of a romantic disposition, there had been a fear that the magical connotations of the moon would be destroyed once we set foot on it - one small step for man, one giant leap backwards for poets, lovers and vampires. But romance persisted nevertheless: instead of traditional lunar iconography (madness, mystery and melancholy) being replaced by the iconography of the landings (space ships, silver helmets, an American flag planted in the Sea of Tranquility), the two were able to co-exist.
To some extent, they have always co-existed. For every painter who has depicted the moon shining high and remote (Turner, Constable, Whistler, Samuel Palmer, William Morris and Atkinson Grimshaw are among the best), there has been a science-fiction writer imagining conquest and colonisation. Young children, too, are indefatigable in their fascination with the moon. "We grow up as children with it, a nursemaid/ of a bonneted sort, round-faced and kind,/ not burning too close like parents" is John Updike's explanation. As kids we're encouraged to believe impossible things of the moon - that it's made of cheese or that there's a man in it. But the space race changed the meaning of impossibility. Once dogs and monkeys were sent into orbit, a cow jumping over the moon no longer seemed mere nursery-rhyme nonsense.
The same goes for a song like Fly Me to the Moon. When Bart Howard wrote it in 1954, playing among the stars and seeing "what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars" sounded like a lover's whim - as ethereal as Debussy's Clair de Lune or Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. But by the time Frank Sinatra recorded the song 10 years later, the title simply echoed the aspirations of Khrushchev and Kennedy. Astronauts and space shuttles became chic. Even fashion designers jumped aboard.
André Courrèges created the Moon Girl look: miniskirts, outsize sunglasses and calf-high, white plastic go-go boots. Paco Rabanne made his name by designing the costumes for Barbarella, a film starring Jane Fonda as a 40th-century cosmic voyager. The sexiness of spacewear was underlined by the opening credit sequence, during which Fonda, floating in zero gravity, slowly removed her space suit.
Innumerable films set in space were to follow - from Star Wars to Apollo 13. But the spectacle of moon landings was hardly new to the cinema: Georges Méliès' Le Voyage dans la Lune, which includes the memorable image of a disgruntled man in the moon getting a rocket in his eye, was a silent movie made in 1902. And that film is indebted both to Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1865), and HG Wells's The First Men in the Moon (1901). But nor were Wells and Verne pioneers: the Greek satirist Lucian of Samosata wrote about a flight to the moon in 160AD. And the theme turned up regularly thereafter, with Daniel Defoe, Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe among those to use it.
Scientists like to pretend the moon is theirs. But artists have inhabited it far longer. And no amount of rocketry and rock sampling can destroy its mystery. The new Louis Vuitton advert, a photograph by Annie Leibovitz, has three former astronauts, Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell and Sally Ride, gazing up at the moon from a battered pickup truck in the California desert. All of them were once up there among the stars. But that doesn't make them any less awestruck as a full white moon - undimmed, untarnished and unattainable - stares coldly down.
The digested read
Philip Hoare's Leviathan wins Britain's most important prize for non-fiction
A childhood love of Melville's Moby-Dick led to a lifetime passion for whales which, in turn, resulted in the writer Philip Hoare tonight being named winner of the UK's most important prize for non-fiction books.
Hoare's Leviathan is part natural history, part literary criticism, part economics and part memoir but at its heart is the author's lifelong obsession for all things whale.
The chairman of judges for this year's £20,000 BBC Samuel Johnson prize, the American political journalist Jacob Weisberg, predicted that Hoare's genre-defying book would become nothing less than "a classic". He added: "The quality of his writing was just so impressive, it is literary, just beautiful. It is a model of a certain kind of writing and I imagine it is a book that will be read for a long time to come."
Weisberg, who until last year was editor of Slate, said the judging experience had been enjoyable but trickier than he had anticipated. "The judging process was extremely difficult and got more difficult as time went on. We had 19 books on the longlist and no-one felt terribly bad about what was left off and even on the shortlist of six, it was difficult but not impossible. Picking the winner from such strong books felt almost impossible. There was a lot of spirited debate and some disagreement but by the end there was a general consensus."
Hoare, who lives in Southampton, has previously written books on figures including Oscar Wilde, Noël Coward and the brightest of the Bright Young Things, Stephen Tennant.
He traces his love of whales to reading Moby-Dick and vividly recalls his first actual encounter with a killer whale at Windsor safari park. Hoare now frequently travels to Cape Cod as a volunteer on a humpback whale identification programme.
Hoare's book saw off competition from a shortlist that also included Ben Goldacre's book version of his Guardian column Bad Science, which Ladbroke's had installed as 2/1 favourite. The others were Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance, an examination of the Great Depression; David Grann's The Lost City of Z, about the British explorer Percy Fawcett who disappeared in the Amazon in 1925; Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder, in which he links a series of biographies on 18th century scientists; and a book praised for making quantum physics accessible and interesting - Manjit Kumar's Quantum.
In total, 166 books were submitted to a judging panel that also included neuroscientist Mark Lythgoe, art writer Tim Marlow, journalist Sarah Sands and Boris Johnson's arts chief Munira Mirza. The reading was split up between the judges with Weisberg properly reading nearly 40 and dipping in to many more – "my mind is now overflowing with pedantic facts," he admitted.
"But I enjoyed it so much. I was sort of thinking with the books that I'll read a chapter and discard it but most of them are so good that you kept on reading. It's meant to be that fiction is escapist in a way that non-fiction isn't. That ceased to be true for me."
Beyond the fringe
Bloomsbury £14.99
Two brothers sit naked in the Kalahari desert.
"I am at one with the Sublime," says Iron Guy, beating a parched elephant bone against his thigh. "I too have found Perfect Happiness," Iron David replies.
"If I recite Gerard Manley Hopkins, do you think Iron Laurens van der Post might appear?" "No, but you will be a literary cliche."
It's two months earlier and David is being given a hard time by his children, Ed and Lucy. "You've lost weight," they say. "Either you're ill or you're going to the gym to pick up a new woman now Mum has died." David says nothing, because he's very deep and is actually much happier now his wife has died.
Ed allows Rosalie to slide on to him. "I do so want a baby now I can't be a ballet dancer," she sobs. "We've only been trying for five years," he reassures her. But Ed is not sure what he wants. He has only just qualified as a lawyer and feels lost since his mother died. He wonders how Lucy feels.
"Despite being number six in the Evening News list of beautiful and brainy women," Lucy says, "I still feel rudderless since Mummy died. Even Josh has dumped me."
David opens a bottle of Chateau Newton - there are no lengths to which Justin won't go to get this novel published by Bloomsbury - and waits for Robin to speak. "Ed's doing very well," he says. "I'm making him partner. But I'm concerned he's getting a little close to one of our female juniors." David is still too deep to reply, so he nods. He needs to get to the gym to reminisce about how he could have been Richard Burton if only he hadn't let his girlfriend Jenni drown. Instead he married Nancy and became a newsreader.
"I've been made a partner," Ed grins. "Well you'd better come back to my flat," says Alice. "It's just a shag, mind. I don't love you." Ed feels guilty when he gets home. "Oh darling," Rosalie cries. "How wonderful. I'm pregnant." "That's marvellous," he says. "Oh no, my period has started."
Lucy and David are walking on Hampstead Heath. Lucy is still lost as she has decided to dump Josh now he wants her back. "I think Miss Jiggly Tits over there fancies you, Dad." she says. Sylvia gushes forward. "You are the famous newsreader. Please talk to our book group."
David looks at the empty bed. He thinks back to how he was going to sleep with Sylvia when Rosalie called. "It's too awful," she had said. "A woman phoned to say she had been sacked for having an affair with Ed. What shall I do?"
"I'd do nothing," he had replied. "Both Nancy and I had affairs and we never said anything and we got on OK. The easiest way to forgive him would be to shag me." "But what if I were to get pregnant by my father-in-law?" "Don't worry, this book is irredeemably shallow so we can both forget about it."
"I've told your wife about our affair," says Alice. "That doesn't sound psychologically convincing from someone who only wanted a shag," Ed replies. "I know," she shrugs. "But Justin couldn't think of any other way of making the plot work."
Ed understands absurd plotlines. "I've been offered a job in Geneva and you can run a ballet company there," he says, as he returns home. "Then the baby will be Swiss!" Rosalie cries. Oh, she's pregnant, he thinks. So that's why she hasn't mentioned my affair.
Iron Dave is lying naked with Iron Guy in the Kalahari. A herd of elephants charges them, but Iron Guy waves his penis at them and they retreat. "You do know I'm dying of cancer," Iron Guy says. "Sure," Iron Dave replies, "But I'm OK, because I now realise I did love Nancy." He buries Iron Guy and flies to London.
"I've met a new bloke, Nick, and I'm getting married," Lucy shrieks. "And I've got a baby," Ed grins. Iron Dave is still at One with his new Oneness. He says nothing. After all, if Justin thinks he can present deceiving his son about the baby's paternity as an act of familial redemption and transcendence, then who was he to argue?
The digested read, digested: Mills & Boon for the chattering classes.
