Percival's Planet by Michael Byers
A book review
In 1928, the underfunded Lowell Observatory in Arizona, the setting for Percival's Planet, was something of a laughingstock among astronomers. It had been founded by the late Percival Lowell, a man convinced of two things: that variations in the orbits of the outer planets suggested the existence of an undiscovered tenth planet and that intelligent life on Mars had built canals to carry water from its polar ice caps. Hard-up for employees with the skills, interest and persistence to pursue its continuing search for "Planet X," the Observatory offered a job to Clyde Tombaugh, a Kansas farm boy patient enough to grind his own telescope lenses, but lacking a college degree. In 1930, it was young Tombaugh, not a university-educated astronomer, who discovered Pluto.
Tombaugh joins a constellation of characters, mostly fictional, who converge on the Observatory over the course of the novel. Alan Barber is a Harvard student whose secret ambition is to find Planet X and also to win his wealthy friend's flirtatious, brilliant girlfriend. Felix DuPrie is the heir to a chemical conglomerate. Stymied by the multitude of options his wealth presents, he heads for the Arizona desert in a search for dinosaur fossils and a profession he can stick to. Mary Hempstead is a beautiful, fragile young woman who struggles to live gracefully despite a delusion she knows is peculiar but can’t seem to shake.
Though Percival's Planet takes some liberties with the history behind Pluto's discovery, altering the timing of certain events and weaving in fictional characters, it offers deep insight into the scientific process. As a novel, it shines. The main characters are likeable, passionate, sometimes misguided human beings striving to make peace with the fundamental uncertainties of life. The period is masterfully evoked, transporting readers to a time a hundred years before our own but not unlike it, when loony theories and sound ones might be indistinguishable and an economic disaster would alter the fortunes of many, not always for the worse. (2010; 414 pages)