“Chabon puts it best: the ascent to the moon had been made on a ladder of bones.” Photograph: NASA/Interim Archives/Getty Images Wernher von Braun with JFK at Cape Canaveral. His grandmother may be the least honest of the protagonists, but she has the best reasons. Chabon is good on marriage, what is told and left untold. His grandmother is a young European Jew with a child and a five-digit tattoo on her arm, a tale of reprisal and atrocity in her past. Chabon has a firm grip on matters of the heart. His marriage is at the centre of the work. He builds model spacecraft, loses himself in dreams of rocketry, moon lore. He marries, goes to jail, soars, stumbles into unlikely riches. He is recruited by the OSS and pursues German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun through the ruins of Europe. As a young recruit, he tries to blow up a Washington bridge to underline his country’s lack of preparedness for the second World War. The grandfather’s life is one worth telling, both in the trajectory and textures of it.

At the same time, the writer warns us that liberties have been taken with truth 'with due abandon'. There's a 1955 reproduction of an Esquire advertisement for a recreational rocket built by his grandfather to underline the biographical nature of the book. The narrator appears to be Chabon himself, writing about his grandfather's life as told to him in the week before the old man died. A short preface to Michael Chabon's Moonglow presents it as a box of narrative tricks.

Chabon moonglow review