The Ash Garden
by Dennis Bock
Reviewed by Barbara Bundy
Hauntingly insightful and stunningly written,
Dennis Bock's The Ash Garden is a penetrating psychological
study in pain, memory, loss, and reconciliation in the face
of the two defining acts of the twentieth century: the bombing
of Hiroshima and the slaughter of the Jews in the Holocaust.
A big topic for a first novel, yet Bock does
not disappoint, largely because he is first and foremost a
storyteller and his "truth" in the work is that of his characters
and their development. Uncanny sensitivity to the "other"
and considerable skill at writing are clearly in evidence
in this book by a young, white Canadian male who crosses cultures,
gender, race, and generations to create the characters of
The Ash Garden.
There is Emiko Atai, a Japanese girl who was playing by the Bantai Bridge in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 when the mushroom cloud erupted on the landscape. The bomb claimed the lives of her parents, brother, and burned half of Emiko's face. Also Anton Boll, a German physicist who worked as a key member of the Manhattan Project on the bomb. Finally, there is Sophie Heinemann, a half-Jewish Austrian refugee whose parents, fearing that she would not survive the Nazis, booked their teen-age daughter passage on the St. Louis. Through a circuitous path Sophie arrives in Ontario, where she meets and marries the young Anton.
All of Bock's characters are exiles, spiritually homeless and bereft of country and family. Internally they remain hostage to the ordeals they managed to survive, 50 years later. As the novel opens in 1995 Emiko is an accomplished filmmaker, unmarried, childless, and consumed by her desire to document the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima. She is in quest of film reportedly taken by Boll of Hiroshima right after the bombing. She meets Anton at one of his lectures at Columbia University. Anton devotes much of his time to lecturing publicly for the purpose of explaining the "ethical responsibility" that motivated him and his fellow scientists to develop the bomb in the name of ending the war and saving humankind. Meanwhile, Sophie is dying of lupus, the disease that left her unable to bear the children she and Anton dreamed of having. Bock masterfully reveals that "it was what they had lost" that finally bound Sophie and Anton, their deepest intimacy that of shared pain.
The Ash Garden is, finally, Emiko's
story. She ends her quest for the truth of the bomb and of
herself—that devastated girl on the beach whom she could
not surrender—with a visit to Anton and Sophie's country
home outside Toronto at the moment when Sophie lies dying.
Sophie believes that Emiko is the messenger sent to deliver
Anton of his war guilt in a way that she herself was never
able to do. The riveting final chapters of the book disclose
surprise revelations and resolutions for both Bock's characters
and the reader — an experience not to be missed!
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