Boys to Men

But what kind of Law can be laid down by a father defined entirely by whimsy?  The "absent male role model" is a literary and sociological cliché that Moonshadow simultaneously invokes and undermines.  Moonshadow has always known who his father is:  one of the Gl'Doses, he is  floating, glowing orb with an enormous mouth used primarily for grinning and laughing.  Though they are all identical, Moonshadow nonetheless realizes when it is specifically his father who observes and perhaps mocks him.  Moonshadow's father is, quite literally, the first cause of his life and his story, abducting his mother, conceiving a child with her, and expelling him from the zoo to seek...adventure?  maturity?  The father is never entirely absent, but he is unpredictable and unreliable; it is from his mother, and his mother's family history, that Moonshadow makes meaning; his father is meaning's opposite. 

Moonshadow's father is the force that sends him on a quest, following a familiar narrative arc.  At the same time, this does not seem to be the sort of quest that would encourage independence and individuation.  The "Fellowship of the Flute" assembled by Moonshadow's father consists of Ira, Frodo the Cat, and Sunflower--since when does the hero of a quest take his mother along with him?  Granted, she dies almost immediately, but the result is that, while the father is the one who gets the narrative rolling, much of what Moonshadow actually does stems from a chain of circumstances connected to her death.  Each incident in his life maps on to a story his mother told him, either from her own life, her parents', or that of her bohemian, institutionalized Aunt Ettie. The first chapter of the series, "Some Family History," is about the Gl'Doses in general--it is entirely scene setting, with no emotional resonance or even reference to the particular Gl'Dose who sired him. Chapter Two is called "More Family History," introducing Sheila/Sunflower and the entire Birnbaum lineage.  The "More" in the title attaches itself to both nouns: more family, more history.

Moonshadow initially assumes his post-zoo life will be like the boys' own adventure stories he read in his childhood:  he will be Peter Pan, D'Artagnan or one of any number of romantic heroes.  Instead, he discovers that, though his path to adulthood will go through the usual touchstones of such stories, he will have to live in multiple genres at once. 

Somehow, Moonshadow got through his autodidactic literary education (not to mention Sunflower's straightforward lessons) without internalizing a simple message: war is hell.  Sunflower slaps a younger Moonshadow when the boy declares his desire to become a solider. A hippie at the height of the Vietnam war, Sunflower could hardly be expected to be the "support our troops" type.  It turns out that she has two very specific reasons for what Moonshadow entitles "Why Mother Hated the Military" and "Why Mother Really Hated the Military".  First, a boy she grew up with died in a car crash after he joined the army, then, her love, Moonshadow's namesake, is shot in the head in Vietnam (his ghost always appears with a hole in his forehead).  But none of this sinks in with our hero, who is delighted to be sent off to battle with Ira as an alternative to incarceration (Moonshadow's life of crime had been quickly cut short by his arrest). The reality of war sinks in quite quickly:  the planet they land on is riddled with corpses, and indiscriminate bombs and gunfire nearly kill him.  A vision of his smiling, indifferent father looks down upon him as he passes out.

Moonshadow wants to be a man of the world, but when confronted with horrific violence, his only shield turns out to be his innocence.  When he and his company are imprisoned in a concentration camp, the kommandant, Darkmeister Eden, immediately sees something in Moonshadow and takes him under his wing. Soon Moonshadow and his companion are performing innocent children's tales for the creature who sends countless living beings to their deaths every day. But a comfortable Moonshadow is a guilty Moonshadow, and so he finds himself asking the kommandant to show mercy to his prisoners. The result is a death sentence, averted only by a well-timed fart on Ira's part and the inexplicable intervention of a group of G'l-Dose ex-machina, who rise above the carnage carrying a befuddled Ira with them, and reduce the town's entire infrastructure to next to nothing in what looks like an afterthought.

This appears to be the only time that Moonshadow's father (or his father's people) intervene positively on his behalf.  Later, when he sees his father's glowing orb floating across from him and Ira as they are chained to a dungeon wall, he directly asks for help, to which the G'L-Dose simply responds with laughter ("Remind me not to buy him a father's day present," Moonshadow quips).  Otherwise, the G'L-Doses appear as a kind of wordless, giggly Greek chorus, Watchers on laughing gas, their presence simply marking the importance of the occasion (as Moonshadow is about to land on the planet where he will lose his virginity, a gaggle of GL'Doses materialize around his ship and laugh hysterically).

It would seem that Moonshadow inherited nothing from his father (he certainly doesn't look like him).  Whereas he has learned everything from Ira, his chosen father who would seem to be the G'L-Doses' opposite.  Yet Ira's stark dissimilarity from Moonshadow's father's race hides some essential commonalities. Each is an almost featureless, cartoonish, physical impossibility:  the spherical, grinning G'L-Doses are essentially bodiless, while Ira, carnal through and through, appears to be nothing but a sentient conglomeration of hair.  The G'L-Doses' display of insouciance and indifference cannot be the whole story, given their choice first to conceive Moonshadow, and then to send him out into the world.  Ira's hostility is disturbingly real (witness his brutal beating of the boy early in the  book), but is combined with a fierce, protective tenderness that displays itself when Moonshadow is at his most vulnerable.  From Ira, Moonshadow has learned to express his anger and his cynicism.  What has he learned from his G'L-Dose father?

Next: Remain in Light