By Alidë Kohlhaas

Writer Dennis Bock chose the bombing of Hiroshima as the underlying theme of his fascinating novel, "The Ash Garden". He singles out three seemingly unrelated characters to give cohesion to his story, as their lives become intertwined, woven, so to speak, into the tapestry of the awesome brilliance of the "second sunrise" over Hiroshima on that fateful August morning: the Japanese call it &"the day the sun rose twice."

On August 6, 1945, when Col. Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, gave orders for the release of the first ever atomic bomb to be dropped on a civilian target, few humans – including its scientist-creators – could even faintly imagine what havoc it would cause, what human suffering. The bomb's creation was a marvel of scientific achievement, whose consequences were barely comprehended at the time. Only weeks later, after the surrender of the Japanese, when scientists and medical personnel examined and studied the surviving victims of this bombing and that at Nagasaki, did the world begin to realize that this weapon could spell the doom for all living things on our globe.

The irony in all this is that the victims and their descendants have become pariahs in Japan. Despite a declaration by the Japanese government that the two bombs have produced no genetic defects, the descendants of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki face continued discrimination when it comes to being married. The Japanese public still fears that effects from the bombs have altered genes.

Bock uses a Prologue to set the scene for us. We witness the child Emiko playing with her younger brother, Mitsuo, in the mud of a riverbank not far from their home in Hiroshima. It is early morning and the two children see a plane high above them from which falls a strange object that looks "like a bloated body with dark skin." This scene of the two children playing early in the morning in the mud – a forbidden pleasure – prior, during and after the falling of the bomb is vividly depicted for us by the writer. The early scene of the children in their play captures the sensual, tactile delight of riverbank and mud coming together in the hands and on the bodies of the children. This vivid imagery continues as the children watch the falling of the strange object. Then just as quickly the delight turns to horror. The reader, who already knows the outcome of the bomb's power, yet having been caught up in the children's play, does not want reality to intrude on the scene.

Throughout the book, the voice of Emiko is always in the first person, the other two characters are in the third, their stories told by an unknown narrator. Yet, these two also play an important role, one in an obvious way, the other in a subtle one. Anton Böll is a scientist, who escapes across the Pyrenees to America with the help of a Portuguese diplomat before WWII begins, and ends up working on the Manhattan Project. On a visit to Canada during the war, he meets Sophie, an Austrian refugee of half Jewish, half Christian background, whose family sent her abroad after the Austrian Anschluss. Her journey to Canada is less direct than Anton's to the USA. She travels on a ship to Havana, but finds herself with hundreds of others prohibited from coming ashore. Eventually her sea journey takes her to Scotland and hence Canada as an enemy alien.

Chapter One opens with Böll giving a talk at Columbia University on August 6, 1995. It is a talk he gives annually with minor variations at different locations. "Fifty years ago, my colleagues and I gathered around a radio in Robert Oppenheimer's office, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, waiting for official confirmation of what, for all of us there, had been a life-long dream," he begins his talk. And then comes the punch line that will hold his audience, and the reader: "And as we all know, dreams sometimes become nightmares."

Of course, there was no one huddled in Oppenheimer's office to listen to the radio. Oppenheimer received confirmation of the bomb's explosion by 'phone from General Groves and is told that "Apparently it went with a tremendous bang." Bock uses artistic licence to make his point. The Ash Garden is, after all, a fictional chronicle of events that truly changed our lives forever. He reaches far into history and into our conscience without preaching at us. There is no condemnation and yet, he invites us to examine our feelings about this distant event just as the three characters he created for us have to look within themselves and come to some kind of peace with the world, with their fate and with each other.

Following Böll's talk Emiko approaches him. She is now a well-known documentary maker and wants to include Böll in a film about the event that binds them together. Immediately we sense that Bock has begun a kind of cat-and-mouse play. Yet, who is the cat and who is the mouse comes as a surprise at the end of his tale.

As with his previous book, Olympia, Bock sets much of Ash Garden against the backdrop of Lake Ontario. The Bölls have moved from New York back to Canada, to fictional small-town Port Elizabeth, where Sophie has created a phantasmagoric garden at the back of their house in which trees and bushes have been shaped into animal and fish forms. This is how Sophie fights her own demons, both physical and emotional. Her seeming acceptance of her illness – lupus – helps Emiko to come to terms with her own inner rage about her own disfigurement that prevented her to see that every story, every life can be viewed from different angles.

The Ash Garden, like Bock's Olympia, reveals an author who is not afraid to step into areas of controversy. That he can do so with gracefully woven sentences in which enigmatic characters become recognizable, in which condemnation and redemption live side by side, but which also subtly clarify the enigma of the moral choice left open to all of us, makes this an important book to read.

[The Ash Garden by Dennis Bock, HarperPerennialCanada, softcover, 281 pages, $19.95]

Olympia
Short Stories woven into a story

There is little in mainstream Canadian literature written by or about Canadians of German ancestry, with the one notable exception, Jane Urquohart's wonderful The Stone Carvers that came out in 2001. Preceding her publication, however, is a book of connected short stories by Dennis Bock called Olympia. Published in 1998, it immediately became internationally recognized. Much to my embarrassment, it escaped my ever vigilant eye for new and interesting Canadian writing. Here then is a belated report and apologetic makeup about my neglect.

Bock used a daring way to introduce and connect his various stories, all of which are told by Peter, the son of German immigrants. Having arrived in this country after World War II, much like Bock's own parents, Peter's family brings with it a heritage that includes Olympic competition. His father finished fifth in the Dragon class yachting event in the Rome Olympics, his paternal grandparents competed in the 1936 Olympics. Bock leads the reader into the world of Olympics and Peter's family history through his reference to out-takes from Leni Riefenstahl's famous propaganda film Olympia about Hitler's Olympics – named Festival of the Nations (Pt.1) and Festival of Beauty (Pt. 2)– in which footage of the dictator is omitted that showed his stone-angry face at American sprinter Jesse Owen's win. The rest of the world, however, saw it and so Bock draws the reader into the past with one long, simple paragraph. It is a past that for some of us has difficult emotional resonances and awakens long, seemingly lost memories, memories that should not stay hidden.

Each of the seven stories, which detail the events in the family's life in Oakville, Ontario and other parts of the province, is introduced with a flashback to the years of the Hitler regime. These short vignettes are chilling in their simple reality. They have the power to transpose one into a period that history must never forget. Peter and his younger sister, Ruby, both hope to follow the family tradition of one day becoming Olympians. This is shattered when Ruby develops leukemia. But other events within the family also begin to erode the innocence of the children. A visit from Germany by the brother of their mother with his wife reveals that there are dark ghosts lurking in the family closet.

Bock creates wonderful images in his stories. There is his young protagonist chasing tornados with his father, reminding one of ones own experiences during the 1985 Barrie tornado. The vividly drawn scene of the youth treading water for 36 hours to raise money for leukemia research during an unending rain storm makes one aware of the immense power of water.

This sense of water appears in a variety of ways in the stories from a drowning in a lake in northern Ontario, an near-accidental drowning in a man-made lake in the town of Milton, to the diving into a Spanish reservoir where villages lie hidden and then are revealed when the water recedes in a forced dam-burst. Anyone, who has ever stood on the top of a huge dam will be able to relate to this scene as it draws the reader into the story; for me this scene is all the more potent for having witnessed the bursting of a dam, and seen the drowned villages revealed in its reservoir. It is always the church steeples that one sees first when the water seeps through the breaks in the dam.

The water and the Olympics run through the stories like the blood in the veins of this fictional family. These are evocative, meaningful elements that take hold of one. Olympia is eminently worth reading. It offers insights, but also great pleasures in the manner in which Bock draws scenes with words.

Click to read Bock interview

[Olympia by Dennis Bock, HarperPerennialCanada, 195 pages, softcover, $18.95]