Reaching for the stars

Rocket Boys, by Homer H. Hickam, Fourth Estate, 368 pp, £15.99 in UK Book Service: To order this book and have it sent directly to your home or office, call The Irish Times Book Service at 1850 30 60 60

I believe it was Truman Capote, in defence of the fictionalised veneer he gave to In Cold Blood, who coined the definition of "faction" as truth interwoven with an author's licence to imagine what most likely went on, rather than what actually did. Homer H. Hickam - even the name gives rise to wonder - maintains that the account he gives in Rocket Boys of his growing up in West Virginia is a true story, and possibly it is, but perhaps only in so far as he remembers how he would have liked it to have been.

I certainly would like to think that this was how it came about, for it is a most heart-warming tale of how one boy's sense of wonder enabled him to break free from the confines of his narrow environment and reach for the stars - literally, in this case, for the path he undertook was to build a rocket that would fly free of the Earth's gravity and soar majestically into the blue-black expanse of space. Brought up in the town of Coalwood, built around the mine that only reluctantly gives up its black gold, Homer - nicknamed Sonny - is the younger son of Homer Senior and Elsie. Older brother Jim, with whom Sonny wages an ever more violent feud, is an ace football player and the apple of his father's eye. Sonny's enquiring mind, however, is guided by his understanding mother, a woman fixed into her time and place by circumstance, but made wise by the strength of her basic integrity.

The tension of the book is provided by the necessity to break free: the town of Coalwood depends for its existence on the seam of coal, the inhabitants must buy the necessities of life in the company store, a barrier of mountains towers over all, and only a narrow strip of sky, with its river of night-time stars, gives notice of the possible existence of another world outside this constricted one. It is no wonder, then, that when, on October 5th, 1957, the Russians send their first rocket, Sputnik, into orbit, Sonny and his friends, fired by the fact that the Americans are lagging behind, decide to lend a hand to Dr Werner von Braun and the rest of the scientists at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, and so form their own Big Creek Missile Agency. The first attempt at a launch - a plastic flashlight powered by the powder from Cherry Bombs - turns out a complete disaster: instead of the rocket surging into space, it is Sonny's mother's rose fence that makes an incandescent question mark against the night sky. Realising that he really doesn't know how to make a space projectile, Sonny reluctantly enlists the help of the school swot, an eccentric named Quentin, who has the habit of expatiating on every subject under the sun in a mock refined English accent.

Further attempts prove to be more successful, and gradually the townspeople are drawn into the great plan. As the seam of coal begins to give out and the miners begin to be laid off, it is the quest to build a rocket to compete at the National Science Fair that holds the small community together. Rocket Boys fully deserves to take its place in the long line of American classics running from Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer through Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath to Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. In its warm and wise account of the lives of a small group of people living in West Virginia in the Fifties of this century, it manages to transcend the banal and turn the story into an account of the richness that lies at the heart of the human ideal. It is a quiet book, but its reverberations will bring a glow of warmth to those willing to listen.