Basso Profundo: Henry Holt

British India was divided into India and the two Pakistans upon gaining its independence in 1947. Systemic violence accompanied Partition, as the division was called, as groups perpetrated all manner of crime against each other. “Partitions,” the debut novel of Amit Majmudar, contains for us a close-up view of the horror, and adds a layer to our understanding (or to mine, at least): it wasn’t only Muslim vs. Hindu – there was a third substantial group fighting for its independence and identity, the Sikhs.

Each of these groups is represented by Mr. Majmudar’s fateful quartet: the riots force Dr. Ibrahim Masud, a Muslim physician in the Punjab city of Amritsar, into the flood of refugees heading for the new Pakistan. Simram Kaur is a fifteen-year-old Sikh girl whose family tries to drug and then kill her rather than let her be defiled by a non-believer. And the heart-breaking little Hindu twins, Shankar and Keshav, get separated from their mother in a crowded railway station. Mr. Majmudar uses an elegant device to bring the four together and keep them that way: the spirit of the boys’ dead father watches over the four and tries in his nearly helpless way to keep them safe, because he knows they need each other.

It takes the four nearly the entire book to meet up; each endures numerous close scrapes where any one of them could have wound up dead or worse. Dr. Jaitly, the twins’ deceased father, urges the quartet onward in his if-wishes-were-horses way, and we suffer and hope along with him. Dr. Masud is the saintly, stuttering, indefatigable center of this inchoate family: he suffers injury and dehydration without complaint, treats every case of sickness and injury that comes his way and there are many in the swelling tide of Muslim refugees. He attracts a battalion of orphan boys and stray dogs to help him on his way and keep him safe. Of all the partitions implicitly or explicitly built up in the narrative – ethnic, religious, social, moral – it’s clear Mr. Majmudar is an equal-opportunity admirer of courage and generosity. By completely ignoring the partitions everyone else seems to require, these final four are a microcosm of the possibility of love and hope.

Mr. Majmudar has crafted a touching, suspenseful, uplifting, gratifying story. This is another reason I love reading debut novels so much. We meet another highly capable practitioner, with a wise heart and a real gift for unfolding a beautiful story.

In “Percival’s Planet,” Michael Byers brings us the fictionalized story of the 1930 discovery of Pluto. This consists of several separate stories, really, only one of which centers on Clyde Tombaugh, the young man fresh off the Kansas farm who actually does the trick. Other narratives involve Boston Brahmins throwing their weight around, a young, beautiful, mentally ill woman, and questing after the impossible dream on all sides.

Percival Lowell set up an observatory compound on a mountaintop near Flagstaff, Arizona, late in the 19th century, for the express purpose of finding the trans-Neptunian planet he assumed must be there. The assumption was rational enough, given the revolutions of the outer planets, and led reputable astronomers like Lowell to invest in the search. Many prominent astronomers of the day began to consider it a fool’s errand, though, and to question the validity of the basic data. And when in February of 1930 Tombaugh finally finds “Planet X,” as it is codenamed, tiny Pluto is nowhere near the size it needs to be to explain the rotation effects. So after the fateful discovery, the scientists still aren’t sure what they have on their hands.

But finding Planet X is only one of the quests that urge the narrative forward. Young and deeply troubled, Mary Hempstead runs out on her ex-fighter fiancé to try to get away from demons. The fiancé eventually starts a cross-country trek to find her; Felix DuPrie, scion of massive wealth, finds fulfillment as an amateur paleontologist. The scientists and mathematicians at the observatory, Percival Lowell’s aged and intolerant widow, and of course Clyde Tombaugh himself, achieve or approach goals to varying degrees. This story contains a variety of outcomes for a variety of characters, but I don’t think I’ve spent enough time with all of them to get the overarching principle in them, if there is one.

Mr. Byers weaves the stories together with telling precision and truth. This is a grand adventure not only in cutting-edge science, but in human struggles as well. Again and again we see “how the other half lives” and how each side of the great wealth gulf stands toward the other. Mr. Byers had to tell this story on a grand scale: the exhausting search of outer space, the vertigous vistas of Arizona, the devastating stock market crash. The scale is grand, but the telling is spot-on, so readable that the pages whiz by with the speed of a hurtling planet.