New Mexico, 1945. Two scientists are working in the desert. One, Lloyd Coulter, is a high-ranking scientist in the Manhattan Project, responsible for creating the mechanism that focuses the energy inside the atomic bomb and causes it to detonate. The other, Darrell Reeves, is an archaeologist at the University of Santa Fe excavating a burial mound that contains a breakthrough discovery: a king from the mound-building cultures of the Midwest, buried far away from the region where he might be expected. The Trinity explosion will eradicate Reeves' burial site, and the Manhattan Project scientists are pressuring him to finish his work and remove the skeletons, and the conflict between them is amplified by Lloyd and Darrell's rival interest in Anna Brown, a young army officer who is assisting both projects.
At first, Lloyd and Darrell are difficult to distinguish. Both are men of science, intensely obsessed with their own projects at the expense of all other things. Darrell is a little older, once married, and his archaeological outlook on the world has failed to help him understand the world of living human beings. When FDR dies, he imagines "Roosevelt's skeleton being unearthed--a long age from now--Roosevelt's bones being brushed clean, the pelvis measured, the signs of his paralysis visible in the joining of his bones." He thinks back on how all his knowledge failed to save his marriage:
Once, he had come home and found her gone to the store. He went into the subterranean stillness of their bedroom and he looked around, trying to read their life together. He went to the dresser to see her artifacts. One at a time he picked up the objects there; he turned them over in his hands, trying to read the clues. Her hairbrush, the bristles worn and bent, black hair tangled there: how thrilling this would be in an excavation, how much he could deduce. From the hair of the woman he could learn about the chemical balances of her body, her age, her health, perhaps her diet. From the brush itself he could learn about the artisans of her society, her economic status, whether she was right-handed or left-handed. But he could not say from this brush why his wife had married him or why she would soon leave him. Perhaps if I could see her bones, she thought. If I could touch her bones. But he knew nothing and he put the brush down.
But soon differences between the two men become clear. Darrell is single-minded and hapless, but in the service of bringing the dead back to life and telling their story; Lloyd projects onto the bomb his fantasies of control. Darrell is sheepish and forthright with Anna; Lloyd stalks her and imagines that the successful test will usher in a new age in which he has the power to bend Anna to his will in the that he's bent the atom. Butler loves the image of the circle: for Lloyd, the circle is two halves of a sphere of plutonium being forced together to make the bomb's powerful core. For Darrell, it's the symbolic circle of the burial mound, meant to describe the whole universe for the King. That circle is a mistake, the representation of the erroneous belief that everything can be known and understood.
Butler dives deep into the psychology of the two men. Lloyd is always thinking about his father, who abused his mother, and the Freudian implications are that this relationship made Lloyd the way he is. But the psychology has the ironic effect of flattening the men and subordinating them to the novel's Big Ideas, like the perpetuation of violence on cosmic and historic scales. Much more interesting, I think, are characters like Anna, who exudes both confidence and uncertainty, a fundamental goodness that isn't impeded, as it might be in some novels, by naivete. She professes to be in awe of the scientist's expertise, but has more wisdom than they do. She's more interesting because Butler doesn't feel the need to psychologize her, only to let her exist.
Similarly, Countrymen of Bones presents a fascinating portrait of Robert Oppenheimer: an aloof genius, with a passage from the Bhagavad Gita always ready (much to the annoyance of everybody else). In one particularly clever moment that expresses an ironic playfulness and a chilling self-awareness, he cameos as a corpse in the Los Alamos amateur theater production of Arsenic and Old Lace. A rancher who, angered at the Manhattan Project for encroaching upon his land, projects that anger onto the archaeologist, also seems especially prescient.
The buried king from the Midwest is a member of a Death Cult, Darrell explains, inspired by reports of the brutality of Spanish conquest. The King had no idea that as he traveled into the Southwest that he was running into the arms of the very violence that terrified his people. And as Darrell unearths more and more of the mound, he finds more bodies, violently killed: trophies, women, that the King took along with him into the earth. We may not have had tools like the atomic bomb, Butler argues, but we have always turned our fear of death into a tool of death.
Ultimately, Countrymen of Bones suffers under the weight of those Big Ideas. It reaches out to try to incorporate Roosevelt, the end of the European war, the revelation of the Holocaust, in ways that feel perfunctory even as it seems like they must have been on the minds of people in 1945. And I don't think--spoiler alert--that it's necessary to have Lloyd rape Anna, or to present the act in detail from Lloy'ds perspective. I don't think his last act, to save them from the atomic blast while sacrificing himself, is a meaningful atonement. But it's a gripping story, and the way that Butler careens from one man's point of view to another's even in the same paragraph is remarkably subtle. Countrymen of Bones has a sharp eye for the way that history, as a story of violence, is incarnated in the lives of individual men and women.
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