The Ash Garden: A Novel - Hardcover

Bock, Dennis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375413022 ISBN 13: 9780375413025

Publisher: Knopf, 2001

Synopsis

A scientist stealing across the Pyrenees into Spain, then smuggled into America . . .

A young woman quarantined on a ship wandering the Atlantic, her family stranded in Austria . . .

A girl playing on a riverbank as a solitary airplane appears on the horizon . . .

Lives already in motion, unsettled by war, and about to change beyond reckoning—their pasts blurred and their destinies at once defined and distorted by an inconceivable event. For that man was bound for the desert of Los Alamos, the woman unexpectedly en route to a refugee camp, the girl at Ground Zero and that plane the Enola Gay. In August of 1945, in a blinding flash, Hiroshima sees the dawning of the modern age.

With these three people, Dennis Bock transforms a familiar story—the atom bomb as a means to end worldwide slaughter—into something witnessed, as if for the first time, in all its beautiful and terrible power. Destroyer of Worlds. With Anton and Sophie and Emiko, with the complete arc of their histories and hopes, convictions and regrets, The Ash Garden is intricate yet far-reaching: from market streets in Japan to German universities, from New York tenements to, ultimately, a peaceful village in Ontario. Revealed here, as their fates triangulate, are the true costs and implications of a nightmare that has persisted for more than half a century.

In its reserves of passion and wisdom, in its grasp of pain and memory, in its balance of ambition and humanity, this first novel is an astonishing triumph.

About this title

About the Author

Dennis Bock’s story collection, Olympia, was awarded prizes in Canada and England. He lives in Toronto.

From the Back Cover

"Dennis Bock's searching, ambitious first novel tells the intertwining stories of two
people from opposite sides of the world who have spent their lives learning to live with the bomb [and] quickly hardens into a crystalline meditation on the defining event of the 20th century and its aftermath... Inventive [and] consistently challenging." Los Angeles Times Book review

"An intellectually demanding, yet emotionally affecting, first novel...A shattering yet generous story not merely about survival guilt or scientific ethics, but the imperfection and resilience of the human condition." -- Kirkus Reviews

"Dennis Bock creates his disturbing universe in the manner of the great moralists like Shusaku Endo or Athol Fugard. Grounding the two predominant man-made horrors of the last century in the lives of his three main characters, Bock's risk-taking imagination, his compassionate intelligence and superb writing, make THE ASH GARDEN an evocative must-read experience." --Wayson Choy

"THE ASH GARDEN can stand comparison with the best novels of our time. It is magnificent." -- Leon Rooke

"THE ASH GARDEN is a controlled explosion of a story, hugely energetic, powerful, and complex...Bock's writing is both dense and immensely readable, as engaging when it focuses on life's minutiae as when it explores life's catastrophes. THE ASH GARDEN is difficult to forget and it rewards repeated readings in a way that few novels can."--Quill and Quire

Reviews

No matter how far they travel from Hiroshima, the protagonists of Canadian author Bock's roomy, thoughtful novel are marked by the effects of the atomic bomb. For Emiko Amai, the imprint lingers on her face, in the form of burn scars from the heat of the bomb's detonation in 1945, when she was six. For Anton B”ll, a refugee German scientist who helped build the bomb, the scars are emotional, though he tried to transform his feelings into images in a series of secret films shot among Hiroshima's ruined buildings. For Sophie, Anton's wife herself a half-Jewish refugee from Austria there is the pain of exile, a debilitating illness and the heavy shadow of her husband's guilt. Though Anton claims that the bomb was dropped "to save lives," he remains acutely aware of the human cost, both to its victims and himself: "I know the world requires a certain payment from us... for the freedoms we enjoy. We have all paid." When Emiko confronts Anton in 1995 at a lecture in New York, he surprises himself by agreeing to participate in a documentary she's filming. He invites Emiko to the quiet house he shares with Sophie in Ontario, and as Sophie declines toward death, Anton tells Emiko all the ways he has influenced her life since Hiroshima. In his attempt to obliquely represent the overwhelming horrors of Hiroshima's destruction, Bock (Olympia) has created a group of characters with closely guarded emotional lives. When they reveal themselves, it's in flashes as brilliant as the splitting of the atom. (Sept. 11)Forecast: Though his novel cannot touch a nonfiction classic like John Hersey's Hiroshima, and may be overlooked in the crowded ranks of WWII-inspired fiction, Bock acquits himself well. A first printing of 60,000 copies and a six-city author tour attest to Knopf's faith in this sophomore effort.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

More than 50 years after the bombing of Hiroshima, that event still resonates as one of the defining moments of the 20th century. This novel explores the consequences of the bomb on the lives of three people who were directly touched by it. Anton Boll, one of the scientists involved with the Manhattan project; his wife, Sophie, the daughter of an Austrian-Jewish violin maker; and Emiko Amai, a documentary filmmaker and one of the bomb's victims. All three are key players in the events leading up to and surrounding the dropping of the bomb. Boll escapes from wartime Europe to contribute a critical piece of information in the bomb's development. Sophie is sent from home aboard the SS St. Louis and ends up in an internment camp outside Quebec City. Emiko, who loses her family and half her face in the bombing, is chosen to come to the States for reconstructive surgery in an act of postwar contrition. From its achingly sad opening to its haunting conclusion, this riveting novel explores the moral ambiguities of war while illuminating a shameful moment in our collective history. Highly recommended.Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Kingston, Ont.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Set 50 years after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, this poetic, affecting novel explores the legacy of that devastation through the intersecting lives of three people. Emiko, a young Hiroshima native who lost part of her face on August 6, 1945, is now a documentary filmmaker working on a feature about the bomb. Her work brings her to a small Ontario city where Anton, a German physicist who worked in Los Alamos, lives with his wife, Sophie, an Austrian refugee from World War II. Like James Thackara's recent novel about Oppenheimer, America's Children (BKL Mr 1 01), this title includes plenty of rich historical detail but keeps its focus on the human stories, especially how creators of the bomb wrestled with the reality of their life work, and, as in Bock's previous novel, Olympia (1999), how losing family during wartime forever imprints the soul. Written in richly described flashbacks that slowly reveal the characters' almost surreal connections, this deceptively understated novel asks crucial questions about how to live and reconcile history in an atomic age. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

We had very little in the days when the war was still far away, in the remote place I imagined all wars lived when I was a girl. When it finally came to our city in August 1945 it consumed what little we had left, and years later, when there was nothing left at all, I was forced to journey to America to begin my surgeries. Of course, when I was a child it had seemed to me that what we'd had in those early days was sufficient. All but the barest necessities had been taken from us, but we didn't know any better. I often thought of the war as some great famished beast that ate away at the heart of my people. But my family was no different from any other family in the Asaminami district, the area of the city we lived in, and my brother and I never missed what we'd never had. I do not know if our parents and grandfather felt the same way.

In what might seem a rare gift in the legacy of my family's suffering, my mother and father were lucky enough to die at the same instant, which, for me, is a slight but not insignificant consolation. Neither had to endure the other's death, or the death of my little brother, who followed them not long after. I was left with only my grandfather to take care of me, a scarred and disfigured girl of six with only half a face; and my grandfather had only me to take care of him. Ten years later, when Grandfather fell ill with tuberculosis and finally joined the rest of my departed family, I was in the process of getting a version of my face back, at Mount Sinai Hospital, in New York City. Before I left for America he had made me promise I would not, no matter the circumstance, return to him before the surgeons had completed their work and I was again his beautiful granddaughter. I kept that last promise, and as a consequence he died alone. But slowly my face--or at least a version of it--was restored to me, just as he had always said it would be.

As I have said, my brother and I did not feel the sacrifice as my parents or grandfather might have. We knew nothing different from what we were living through then. It had been like that all our lives, it seemed. The drone of high-flying airplanes, the piercing song the sirens played when a fire- or bombing-drill was staged, the general absence of men in civilian dress, blackout paper covering every window, nothing to eat but rice and bean-paste soup and cabbage. These things did not occur to me as anything special. We knew nothing but war. Planes trolled the skies above our heads. Sirens woke us most mornings. The trenches we'd constructed to contain the spread of fire split neighborhoods into sections. That men must wear uniforms seemed so normal that a young man seen wearing slacks and jacket and fedora looked wildly eccentric to my eyes. Similarly, my father stood out conspicuously. He had not been allowed to join the army. He had been forced to stay home.

The fear I heard in my mother's voice, too, was unexceptional, as were the attempts she made to mask it with reassuring pronouncements and stern, even confident instructions. Outside the home she obeyed my father, as tradition dictated. But inside, where it counted most, I learned, it was the other way around. When action was to be taken, or caution to be exercised, it was my mother who decided which action or cautionary measure. It was she who protected me and my brother, and cared for our grandfather when his breathing became weak or his rheumatism became unbearable, and it was she who tended to my father when he came home disoriented late at night (I didn't know what drunkenness was then), which he did more frequently as the war drew on.

One night I heard my father admit to my mother that he had brought shame to his family and to himself by failing to gain entry to the war. After hearing a loud noise, I'd risen from the mattress I shared with Mitsuo and watched my father cry into my mother's arms, as I stood there at the top of the stairs, hidden in shadow. He insisted that he had been condemned to live out his days branded a coward and a pacifist, a word which was new to me. Pitiful tears streamed down his face. My mother cradled his head and smoothed his cheeks as he pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers, as if trying to staunch the flow of tears. I wondered if I would be capable of this same tenderness my mother showed. I had never seen my father in this state. But I saw from how she held him in her arms that it was not unknown to her, and that this was something the grown-up world had suddenly, just then, thrust upon me.

My mother listened patiently. She let my father finish talking-crying, then got him in a chair and washed his face with a kitchen cloth. He was mumbling, looking down at his hands. I was afraid for him, and of him. He said the word children under his breath, and my little brother's name, but as far as I could tell he did not speak of me.

My father did not go to work the following morning. He stayed in his bed while we assembled downstairs and ate our gruel and rice-bran dumplings. After breakfast, my mother sent Grandfather to the bank, despite his sore legs, to tell the people there that Father was ill. I accompanied him through the streets to deliver our message.

Though we had all been affected by the war, and the network of trenches and water-filled ditches constructed in the event of an enemy firestorm now marked the city into grids, none of the buildings we passed had been destroyed. As we walked, my grandfather told me that even the enemy respected the beauty of some of our most ancient cities. Not even barbarians would consider destroying our lovely town. Trying to put me at ease, he told me that people of Japanese ancestry were living among the enemy, in distant America, where they had worked to convince their government to spare us. Naturally this knowledge did calm my anxiety, but I was agitated for another reason. What I had seen the previous night was with me still. I wondered if my grandfather knew about my father, and the real reason he was unable to represent us in the world that day.

The streets were already busy that morning. I watched the Miyajima streetcar make its slow crawl up from the harbor, where it always began its run, carrying the older men to their places of work, or housewives to their shopping. Work gangs from outlying communities assembled on street corners, waiting for their morning assignment. There was always more to be done in preparing our city for what might come, and not a morning went by when these work gangs did not collect on street corners in every district, focusing their attention on the tasks ahead. That day there were many soldiers in the streets and on the tram, and their presence further eased my nervousness. We knew they were our protectors, and I secretly understood my father's shame at not being permitted to be one of them on account of his leg, the consequence of a childhood affliction. It would have been a great honor for us. The fathers of many of the children in our neighborhood were away at the war, and at school these children were awarded a special status that I envied. The teachers told us that we were all able to contribute equally, whether at home or away at the war, but the daughters of soldiers were emboldened by the absence of their fathers.

On our route to my father's place of employment to deliver our deceitful message, an odd sensation crept over me. He might indeed be ill, I considered, but he suffered from a different sort of illness from the one we meant to suggest. I was not supposed to know this, of course. My mother was not aware I had heard what had passed between them the night before. But telling a lie--and to the bank! This seemed dangerous and exciting, and opened up for me a new world of unknown possibilities.

We turned left, then right onto the business street, where my father's bank was located. Many of these buildings had been here longer than my grandfather, which seemed an impossibly long time to me. Sometimes I liked to walk along this street--and others, in different neighborhoods--and imagine Grandfather here, as he might have appeared at my young age of six. He had spent the whole of his youth in Hiroshima and, in my mind, it was not difficult for me to create a picture of him as a boy. I used my little brother's small frame as a stand-in when I thought back to what it must have been like, in another century. My imagination simply drew his clear, youthful face and body over my grandfather's old, wrinkled one. I painted his portrait in my head, and a streetscape of what Hiroshima had looked like back then, without soldiers carrying rifles on every corner and blackout paper pasted over every pane of glass. I painted men who wore their dark robes like lords, and wealthy landowners and women costumed in traditional flame-colored kimonos, which had been replaced during the war years by the durable monpe pantaloons all women had taken to wearing.

When we entered the bank, my grandfather asked for Mr. Hatano, the manager. We waited silently at one end of a large room for him to meet with us. Finally his office door opened and he emerged. He crossed the hardwood floor, a stack of papers clutched under his right arm, and bowed respectfully to my grandfather. His shoes creaked. He smelled of soap and hair grease.

"I have been sent by my daughter," my grandfather began, after returning an equally deep bow, "Mrs. Yokuo Amai, to tell you that my son-in-law, Haruki Amai, a diligent employee of this institution, is ill today and is unable to honor his responsibilities. I am to tell you that he will be well tomorrow and that he is deeply regretful he cannot take his post today."

This was my grandfather's particular way of speaking, but it was a manner appreciated by those of his generation, a part of which the man he was addressing seemed to be.

We walked home hand in hand, slowly because of Grandfather's bad legs. I did not ask if he knew he'd been entrusted with a lie. It occurred to me that I might be the only one, besides my mother, to know the true cause of my father's malaise. My child's...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375413022
• ISBN 13: 9780375413025
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304