Like much of Striking the Sun, this chapter is a grotesque caricature that is true to my life experiences. Susan’s part of the chapter mirrors many a journey I took in London, attending pop-up events for work and leisure. This would sometimes be artsy things, but recall that I was a cycling journalist and would often attend bicycle-adjacent functions. There’s a peculiar tragedy in showing up at a ramshackle event and having people excited to see you because you are, somehow, the most important person attending. I’m not a VIP, I’m just here to drink a beer and hang out. And now I know you’re following what I do, I can’t write anything mean about it either.
The naive art in this chapter feels particularly visceral to me because the movie she goes to see was a real movie. It was mine from when I was about 18. And it had an even more stupid title than the book version: ‘Finding nemo.’
In the book, of course, it’s called ‘Striking the sun’ and functions as a meta text. It also, and I will not dwell on this beyond this sentence, places me and Striking the Sun on the same pedestal as the filmmaker and his movie. That is, clumsy artists presenting their rickety, dull work as though it’s profound. Let’s not think about that too much.
Structural Pairings
The main character threads of Striking the Sun—the perspectives of Susan, Dominic, and Henri—are separate for much (but not all) of the novel. Yet I was careful to pair these disparate threads closely as the plot progresses, so that each piece of the narrative continues to touch and complement one another.
In chapter 5, Staring at the Sun, I pair the glamour of sport and the pretension of the media with the intent of revealing them to be the same thin, fragile performance. Both adjacent threads, Susan watching the amateur film while Dominic pursues his formative pro cycling career, explore the delusion of “becoming.” They are fundamentally the same story:
1. Identity Performance (The “Auteur” vs. The “Athlete”)
In the first part of the chapter, Susan watches a filmmaker who uses shallow, symbolic imagery (the alarm clock, the tie, the word processor) to capture what he thinks adult drudgery looks like. He is an eighteen-year-old child playing at being a tragic auteur.
When we later rewind to an eighteen-year old Dominic, he is doing the same thing, playing at being a “professional athlete,” wearing his Bike to the Future jersey and attending fundraisers for a broke charity.
Both the filmmaker and Dominic are using props to convince themselves (and others) that they are already the people they hope to become. The shaky camerawork of the student film is a metaphor for Dominic’s shaky emergent pro career, his junior National Champion jersey is an achievement just as the filmmaker’s triumphant screening to a captive audience, yet both are ultimately just kids playing at a role at this stage in their lives.
2. Conflict with the Parental and Conformity
In the flashback, Dominic’s mother offers a pragmatic argument. She wants him at university, to be an estate agent, or even serving fast food: anything but reckless abandon. Susan’s father reacts with similar disdain toward her writing, discovering her sexuality and wanting her to conform to traditional roles.
Both Susan and Dominic are trapped in a reactionary loop. They aren’t chasing their dreams because they necessarily love the sport or the writing, they are chasing them because they hate the domestic life they grew up in, and which their parents represent. This creates a shared vulnerability: because they are fueled by spite rather than genuine passion, they are incredibly susceptible to being exploited by figures like Hudson Ivory or the editorial board at the Globe.
While I believe the above is sufficient, I’ll note two things. First that this element of Dominic’s backstory is revealed as early as chapter two, but this is the first time we see a similar background for Susan. And she’s quite the tragic example of what this leads to when unconstrained. The second point is that we specifically do glance back at the filmmaker’s parents and, unlike for Susan or Dominic, we find them supportive.
3. A Carrot on a Stick (LaxRelief vs. The Globe)
Dominic believes that signing with LaxRelief is the natural progression and the link he needs to get to the glamour of Continental Europe. Susan believes that her writing and her presence at the Globe will eventually lead to the dynamic career she envisions.
Both delusions capture the optimism of the amateur (which the novel forces us to watch play out more literally in the church filmmaker screening event). Hudson Ivory and the newspaper editors feed Dominic and Susan just enough crumbs (the promise of a pro contract, the promise of a profitable magazine launch) to keep them hungry, while the real power remains with the institutions.
4. The Erasure of the Self
The most relevant alignment of the two threads is how the dream comes to erase the person. And, of course, that’s the point of the whole novel.
Susan watches the filmmaker try to “suffer this artificial misery to depict the hidden day-to-day tragedy of life.” Dominic is doing this right now. He is suffering the misery of the freezing North Yorkshire winters, the broke charity team, and the heavy bike to depict the tragedy of his own rise to glory. They are both sacrificing their actual, present lives for a narrative that they believe will validate their existence later.
Susan is watching the filmmaker and criticizing him for the exact behavior she and Dominic are currently exhibiting. She’s watching someone else pretend to be an adult, while she and Dominic are doing the same thing.
Narrative Mirrors
I greatly enjoy the ‘Striking the sun’ film sequence. It combines humor, the grotesque, the tragic, the introspective. All things that permeate through the entire book.
It also functions as a narrative mirror, where Susan watches a film that is essentially a condensed, amateur version of the very novel she is living in.
The film within the book is also titled Striking the Sun. By having Susan watch a film with the same title as her own reality, we establish a Russian nesting doll narrative. It’s telling us, “there’s a lot of stupid, funny, harrowing stuff going on in Susan’s story, but pay attention to this piece, because it’s important.”
The film’s protagonist stares at the sun until he dies. It’s explained through a profoundly awkward and clumsy voiceover that says “when you’ve given up everything you’ve got, sometimes it’s easier to lose.” Yet, despite being pitched as naive, embarrassing, and inauthentic, this is part of the novel’s thesis: Dominic, Susan, and Henri are all staring at the sun of their own obsessions (cycling, work, the past), trying to find an “opt-in reality” that feels fairer than the one they were born into.
1. Susan’s Projected Trauma
I mentioned this earlier, but there’s more to dwell on here. This chapter is the bridge between Susan’s present malaise and her repressed past. When she watches the film’s montage of “alarm clock, tie, keyboard, word processor,” she drifts from reviewing bad art to recognizing her own imprisonment in the corporate machine.
More importantly, the film triggers a flashback to her father’s rejection of her teenage scripts, and specifically his anger at the content of girls falling in love with girls. As Dominic’s cycling is paired with physical escape in his early teens, so too is Susan’s writing irrevocably paired with her sexual identity. This is the origin story of her current isolation. The film serves as a catalyst, forcing her to confront the fact that she moved to London to escape the judgment of the real world, only to find herself just as judged and trapped in the Globe office.
2. The Filmmaker as an “Anti-Mirror”
Susan’s reaction to the eighteen-year-old auteur is a severe example of professional projection. She mocks his pretentious typefaces and lack of tripods, yet she quietly envies his ambition. She realizes he is not yet jaded enough by the world to give up and drown his boredom in alcohol.
In a sense, the filmmaker is who Susan could have been if she hadn’t let the Globe strip her of her enthusiasm. Or perhaps, a person she’d want to be if the world was fair enough to let her be it. Her critique of him is actually a critique of her own “blood of a poet,” the creative spirit that still flickers beneath her drinking and her deadline-driven drudgery.
This sentiment is expressed most resoundingly by Dominic in chapter 46, which I point out only to make clear that is a common thread throughout the novel. Striking the Sun takes place in a heavily mediated world. Is true love possible in this world? Is any authentic act?
3. “Attritional Tragedy”
The phrase “The attritional tragedy of adult life” is the heartbeat of the novel in many ways. There’s a distinction between “catastrophic” tragedy (the kind that makes for good TV news… and bear that in mind for much later in the novel) and “attritional” tragedy (the kind that grinds a person down one day at a time).
By having Susan immediately recognize this “attritional tragedy” in a low-budget amateur film, we elevate the minor struggle of her daily life to the level of art. To what end? The point is that her pain is just as worthy of being filmed and analyzed as a professional cyclist’s race to the podium.
