Dennis Bock: The Ash Garden

By JENNY JONES

It's unusual for an author to flout the autobiographical imperative that naturally attaches to one's first novel. But in The Ash Garden, Dennis Bock, graduate of a highly praised short story collection, Olympia, embarks confidently on themes on the grand scale.

He begins with a first-person account of what it was like to be in Hiroshima the day the atomic bomb fell "and the air jumped alive with objects that never had flown before".

Scampering to and fro among 1945, 1995, Japan, Canada and places and times between, Bock then sets about presenting "the truth of the matter". Through Emiko, the disfigured child survivor of Hiroshima, he asks the moral questions. Through Anton Boll, a German scientist who helped to develop the bomb and monitor its effects, he provides scant, unsympathetic answers and shows that Boll, too, is scarred by the bombing.

Through Boll's wife Sophie, an Austrian Jewish refugee, he examines the effect of loss of family and homeland.

As the politics of memory is one of the themes, Bock tracks his characters' blighted lives through their own painstaking recollections.

Symbolism also plays a dangerously important role. Emiko is painting her grandfather's face in mud on her little brother's back when the bomb is released, searing the image into his body for the few weeks before he dies.

Sophie's face erupts in a butterfly rash as the bomb wreaks its destruction in Japan. Out of twisted wire, she creates tortured animals as a basis for topiary.

If this sounds contrived, it is. What begins powerfully, with Emiko in Hiroshima, winds down into something close to static, where the grand themes of suffering, loss, memory and truth bury any real sense of story. What we get remains at the level of depiction.

And though Bock tries to tell "the truth of the matter", he makes no effort to present the overwhelming reality of war in people's lives in 1945.

It's easy now, from the upholstered comfort of more than 50 years, to condemn the bombing of Hiroshima, but decisions like this are not made in a moral vacuum and in 1945 this was especially so.

After five years of war that enveloped people all over the world, there was an overwhelming sense of weariness. Japan was uncompromisingly expansionist. Australia was scared witless and even New Zealand had built bunkers at North Head.

The Americans had suffered casualties in the hundreds of thousands as their soldiers tried to make their way to Japan via heavily militarised islands of the Pacific. Dropping a new bomb on Japan was seen as a way to stop the never-ending haemorrhage of Allied casualties. Bock mentions none of this, except as cliches in Boll's lectures.

Neither does he mention the far less-defensible bombing of Nagasaki, though interestingly history records that a namesake, scientific researcher F.C. Bock, piloted an aircraft monitoring the dropping of the second bomb.

Perhaps The Ash Garden's deletion of Nagasaki owes more to a need to disguise personal connections than to "tell the truth of the matter".

Bloomsbury

$34.95

* Jenny Jones is an Auckland writer