Traveling the Age of Reason and beyond

AZHAR ABIDI is a Pakistan-born writer living in Australia whose middle initial could be A for audacity. Flouting the cliche of “write what you know” (at least for starters), he aims in his first novel not only to evoke the fantastic collision of ideas during the Enlightenment, but also to make believable what never was: the exploration in the early 1700s of continents and even the stratosphere by a couple of brothers in a flying machine.

His inspiration for the noble-unto-madness hero of “Passarola Rising” is Father Bartolomeu Lourenco, a real Portuguese cleric in the annals of aviation history who was hounded to death by the Inquisition for his design of a balloon that would realize man’s dream of flying.

Abidi’s fictional Bartolomeu is elder brother to the somewhat bumbling narrator Alex. Recalling their adventures together, Alex starts with the festive takeoff from the palace in Lisbon, then describes dodging the pope’s troops and a warm welcome in Paris by King Louis XV and Voltaire.

There follows a royal commission to rescue the pretender to the Polish crown. This feels like a thematic detour but offers a chance to depict the bloody hell and insanity of 18th century warfare, not that it differed much from our own.

The brothers’ reward for service rendered is a truly fascinating, terrifying challenge: To settle the reigning dispute over the shape of the earth’s poles by flying beyond terra cognita into the realm of ice and monsters, perhaps of Satan himself.

On the personal, human scale there is considerably less action. Maria, young Alex’s first flame, is left to sizzle other vulnerable hearts in old Lisbon. Which is just as well, since the vixen already warned, “I will bring you nothing but misery. Oh, it is in my nature! I scorn the lips that kiss me.”

Bartolomeu, age 26 at the time of his first ascent, appears firmly above any sensual or sentimental attachments. The king’s jocular dig, “It would appear that even Aphrodite would not stir your blood unless she came on silver wings,” turns out to be all too true. Even the central relationship between the brothers never really deepens beyond Alex’s hero-worship and Bartolomeu’s leadership, until, after a hallucinatory near-death experience years later, Alex decides to abandon the ship to seek an earthbound life.

But does a lack of emotional complexity matter? After all, the raison d’etre of this kind of novel is neither to create original and unforgettable characters nor to illuminate the secret passages of the heart, any more than those subjects preoccupied Jules Verne in “Around the World in Eighty Days.” “Passarola” is a classic sidekick picaresque set in a males-only world, in the tradition of the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Huck and Tom, Watson and Holmes.

But of all these tales it is Verne’s that keeps coming to mind, and not only because of the superficial resemblance between means of transportation in the two books. In each, daring technological concepts provide the real suspense and passion. For Abidi, as for Verne, technology serves the far loftier goal of discovering the laws and marvels of the natural world.

In other words, the power of these novels stands or falls on the plausibility of their inventions. And it is here that “Passarola Rising” suffers by comparison. Too many natural laws have to be suspended to make Bartolomeu’s airship fly. Lifted by copper spheres enclosing a vacuum (an impossibility one accepts for the sake of the yarn), it is also wind-propelled by sails -- in complete contradiction of the physics of Newton, one of Bartolomeu’s heroes!

“Passarola Rising,” with its evocation of the joys and dangers of living in the clouds and dramatization of some key Enlightenment Age debates, might be a great book to give a sharp-minded teenager. It might even be a future adventure classic. On the other hand, there is no one like a sharp-minded teenager to notice when the technology has no clothes.

Kai Maristed is the author of the novels “Broken Ground,” “Out After Dark” and “Fall.”