The Ash Garden
By Dennis Bock
Knopf, 281 pages, $23
With the explosion of the first atomic device over the New Mexico desert in 1945, “[t]he boundaries of the physical world . . . suffered a fundamental shift,” Dennis Bock writes in “The Ash Garden.” When it was followed in less than a month by the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, the ethical boundaries of the world underwent a transformation perhaps even more profound, and one surely much harder for humanity to comprehend.
Bock’s ambitious and engaging, though occasionally too-clever, first novel tells of the struggle of three people, strangely united by the noiseless flash of that Aug. 6, to come to terms with both changes.
Anton Boell is a man whose life is controlled by two guiding principles: physics and ambition. Like so many other scientists in Nazi Germany in the early years of the war, he fled to the U.S. But unlike most, he emigrated neither because he feared for his life nor because he opposed Hitler. Boell moved on because of a professional squabble. Convinced that German scientists were on the wrong track with their reliance on heavy water rather than graphite to sustain a nuclear reaction, unable to convince them of the errors of their ways, and therefore worried that he would be denied due credit, he fled to where his ideas would be appreciated: Los Alamos. ” ‘I did not leave fascism,’ ” he admits many years later, ” ‘as much as leave a place that could not accommodate my work.’ “
Once in New Mexico, he found favor, contributed significantly to the design, testing and use of the bomb and-most important to one so self-centered as he-received credit for his efforts. To Boell, in those days, such recognition meant more than the fact that the Allies had beaten the Germans to the bomb. Not even marriage to Sophie, a half-Jewish refugee from Austria met on a visit to a Canadian detention camp, could bring him to sense much of a world beyond his own concerns and ambitions. But going to Hiroshima to measure the results of “this great experiment” as part of a damage-assessment team does.
Being surrounded there by devastation and burn victims changes Boell utterly, and from then on, his time is spent — sometimes awkwardly, sometimes with rough grace — trying to add a moral dimension to his life and to justify his role in the development of the bomb. But his efforts turn him away from Sophie, her worries about the fate of her family and about her own advancing health crisis. Even in the ways he tries to develop concerns for things beyond his own life, in other words, Boell cannot help but put himself above others, even his wife. However much the author tries to make the connection between Hiroshima and the Holocaust, his protagonist refuses to acknowledge any similarity, certain that no one else could possibly have as heavy a burden to bear as he. “This is what you get,” he thinks while wandering through the broken shards of the Japanese city. “This terrible lesson in humanity.” The 20th Century was, of course, filled with a multiplicity of terrible lessons in humanity, but for this strangely limited man of science, this must be the only one, the one he selfishly preserves as his own: “It was as if that blast had destroyed the ability to see beyond himself.”
Though such an ability has always been one of Boell’s lesser qualities, after witnessing what his science has wrought, it recedes even further. Sophie, who becomes a disappearing phantom in his now-altered reality, realizes at once that Hiroshima “would hold one part of him hostage for the rest of their lives.” The bomb, at the exclusion of all else-her health, their marriage, his work, even his ambition-becomes his one obsession. His wife, needing to value her own life beyond his indifference perhaps, retreats into a momentary affair with an Italian whose family is also missing in the wastes of Europe, but Boell senses nothing (Would it matter if he did?) and continues on his own self-absorbed quest.
His fixation is later abetted by Emiko Amai, whose flesh was seared in Hiroshima at age 6, who underwent extensive reconstructive surgery in New York as a teenager, and who became a documentary filmmaker. Her subject, naturally enough, is the bombing and its aftermath, as she seeks to come to terms with the internal wounds she has borne most of her life without fully understanding. Just as naturally, 50 years after the event, she seeks out Boell.
Together, the three of them go on to perform a kind of metaphorical danse macabre that ends up by a lake in Ontario where Sophie begins her final “conversation with death” and Boell is revealed at last as “a man overwhelmed by his own sense of defeat.” As for Emiko, she is the only one to emerge intact, the only one to have gained any understanding of the world and of her place in it. But her comprehension does not imply knowledge; instead, it sets the limits to knowledge. “Some facts,” she realizes at the end, “and most lives must remain mysterious and unsolvable. Intentions were forever obscure.” Surely her discovery is less than she’d hoped for, but perhaps it will be enough.
Bock is a Canadian whose previous effort, “Olympia,” was a collection of connected short stories involving two generations and the different universes they inhabit. There are obvious echoes of that theme in “The Ash Garden,” and obvious differences too. Here characters of different generations are united by a single moment, reactions colored by their own histories as well as by their individual experiences of that moment. The three protagonists, each in his or her own way, offer powerful testimony to our common history.
Unfortunately, that testimony is diluted at times by the intrusion of a sort of authorial cleverness and a weight of heavy-handed symbolism that doesn’t always seem to lead anywhere. At the same time the bomb is dropped and Emiko suffers the burns that will forever change her life, Sophie, a world away, observes for the first time the rash that signals the onset of lupus, the illness that will forever change her life. Later, when the Boells move to Canada, Sophie spends much of her time constructing a topiary maze that obviously mirrors the psychic maze they are all wandering through. The novel’s first and last scenes are set by water, suggesting — what? That the novel’s theme balances the evolution of science from the primordial liquid against humanity’s devolution into the same liquid? Maybe, but perhaps it is just meaningless coincidence. The trouble is that “The Ash Garden” is just too overloaded with symbols and possible symbols for us to sort them all out.
It needn’t be. The story by itself, and the characters by themselves, are strong enough to spare readers a “guessing game of unresolved meanings.”
