It's really a 3.5, because I'm honestly torn between 3 and 4. Some parts I really liked, some parts left me cold, and I wasn't wild for the one chapter with the young schoolboy and his jacket. But I can't act like Louisa Hall isn't a good writer on a craft level, and I think her portrait of Oppie is a very nuanced, complicated one. Plus she threw in a Feynman playing bongos reference, and that is just absolutely in my wheelhouse. ( )

Trinity by Louisa Hall (b. 1982) was an impulse loan from the New Books stand at the library. It was nominated for the 2019 Dylan Thomas Prize, which was won by Guy Gunaratne's In Our Mad and Furious City (which I reviewed here).

Trinity, set in the US in the 20th century, is narrated by seven (fictional) people who knew Robert Oppenheimer. Some people call him the Father of the Atom Bomb, but I think that 'father' is too benign a word to use (even though, of course, I know that not all fathers are benign). Oppenheimer was not the sole instigator of the nuclear age, but he was head of the Los Alamos laboratory that developed the first nuclear weapons for the Manhattan Project, and he oversaw the first successful detonation in July 1945. He was essential to the project.

There are plenty of people who interpret Nagasaki and Hiroshima as events which shortened the war against Japan and saved lives. There are also people who thus judge the motivation for the decision to drop those bombs as humane. I am not one of them. Even if I accepted those grounds (which are disputable) and could theoretically acquiesce to the decision to bomb Hiroshima, the decision to bomb Nagasaki shortly afterwards is insupportable. I think the decision to use those bombs was about demonstrating not only that the US was the supreme military power, but also their capacity to dismiss the cost to human life. Stalin won his war by ignoring the cost of casualties on his own side, and the US won the peace by demonstrating that they could be equally pragmatic about the cost of human lives in the pursuit of their objectives. Those bombs were intended to show Stalin that the US would not be squeamish if the Cold War escalated.

So you can see that I read this book without much sympathy for Oppenheimer. The 'Testimonials' include

• Sam Casal, a secret service agent who tailed Oppenheimer in 1943;


• Grace Goodman, a rather star-struck WAC (Women's Army Corps) among the military at Los Alamos in 1945;


• Andries Van Den Berg, a former colleague now working on a project in Paris in 1949, a man denied a visa to return to the US (probably due to Oppenheimer's betrayal);


• Sally Connelly, a wannabe novelist with an eating disorder, who works for Oppenheimer in 1954 at Princeton;


• Lía Peón, on the holiday island of St John in 1958, one of a gay couple and has an unhealthy curiosity about Oppenheimer's court room appearances under McCarthyism;


• Tim Schmidt, a student in Massachusetts, 1963, reflecting on the 'rehabilitation' of Oppenheimer's reputation in the Kennedy era


• Helen Childs, Princeton, 1966, a journalist interviewing Oppenheimer just before he dies.

Trinity, however, is about more than Oppenheimer and his contrary behaviour: his affairs; his support and betrayal of his Communist friends; and his on-again/off-again support for nuclear weapons. The novel also explores the way people believe what they want they want to believe: how they delude themselves and how they can justify unethical behaviour when it suits them. These characters with their testimonials often tell us more about themselves than they do about Oppenheimer. They reflect on their own betrayals, their refusals to admit reality, their inability to see the truth, and their folly in acquiescing to what's expected of them rather than choosing for themselves. The saddest and most convincing of these characters is Sally, whose sister is devastated by the images she sees of Japanese victims, and who can see no future in a world where these weapons threaten everyone.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/06/14/trinity-by-louisa-hall/ ( )

Robert Oppenheimer is an interesting character. He is, of course, best known for leading the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos which led to the development and delivery of the atom bombs used against Japan in 1945. Earlier in his career he had been Professor of Physics at Berkeley, and had also supported a range of liberal campaigns that would subsequently be deemed to have amounted to Communist sympathies during the McCarthy era. As a consequence he was grilled by the House Un-American Affairs Committee, and was subsequently ostracised by much of the scientific community.

Oppenheimer stands at the heart of Louisa Hall’s novel, which takes the form of reminiscences by seven people who had known him at different stages of his life. These accounts include that of an FBI agent assigned to watch over him during his highly secret work at Los Alamos, a description of him relaxing at parties on the secret establishment, and an interview by a Japanese American woman, after his debilitating experience before the Sneate Committee.

Hall pulls this off these different presentations very deftly, rendering an almost kaleidoscopic presentation of him. This achievement is all the more remarkable as Oppenheimer often seems a very peripheral character in the different accounts. All seven memoirs focus far more on the person giving the reminiscences than on Oppenheimer, but, when they are taken together, a clear picture of a brilliant but troubled man emerges.

Trinity is far from a hagiography, and it is clear that while he was undoubtedly an accomplished, perhaps even a great, man, Oppenheimer may have had feet of clay. I was aware that I knew appallingly little about Oppenheimer before reading this book, and I am now eager to learn a lot more. ( )