Book review | Nocturne, by James Attlee

In the punch-drunk British comedy series The Mighty Boosh, the moon often interrupts scenes to address the viewer. An actor’s face covered in shaving cream reads a poem about himself or recounts the time he licked the sun’s back during an eclipse. It’s a portrayal of the moon that British writer Attlee (Isolarion) can relate to: a quixotic, psychedelic second-class citizen of the sky.

In Nocturne, Attlee goes “in search of moonlight,” and he means this quite literally. Early on, he sees a full moon hanging over his backyard, but the ambient light of his hometown drowns out any of the satellite’s reflective glow. He sets off down the street and into a shaded park, by a river, before he feels he’s finally in a pure batch of moonlight. He’s a bit grumpy about the search, wondering why streets have to be so artificially illuminated when there’s all this great moonlight around (mostly because of things like rape and robbery, James).

But if Attlee’s a codger, he’s our kind of codger. For the rest of the book He and the moon woo each other in equal parts. The author uses the moon as an entry point into the history of astronomy and the way various cultures have viewed the night sky (a highlight of the book is a trip to Japan for its annual lunar festival). And the moon shows Attlee new sides of itself; in Oxford, he experiences the work of British artist Katie Paterson, who bounced a Morse code translation of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” off the moon and played back the eerie, spacious music that returned. Grumpy, wandering but also wondering, Attlee proves an entertaining muse for the moon.