WWII aftershocks rumble in Southwest

In the Shadows of the Sun

A Novel

Alexander Parsons

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday: 272 pp., $23.95

*

Make two lists, one of horrific events, the other of places with character. Draw random lines between entries in the two columns and pick the most fertile of the combinations. For “In the Shadows of the Sun,” Alexander Parsons chose the Bataan Death March and Tularosa country of southern New Mexico.

The link is Jack, a soldier from a dysfunctional cowboy family who, as a World War II prisoner in Japanese hands, is repulsed watching fellow POWs drop dead from continuous maltreatment. Early on, Jack suggests a proper burial for a fellow soldier. “He had not yet seen men strung up by their thumbs, their guts spilled out, genitals stuffed in their mouths, eyes gouged out.” When Japanese guards bayonet his friend Conrad to death, it is a lesson on how to thrust the blade in just so.

Back home, the military is appropriating land from Jack’s family and his hardscrabble neighbors. Something about a bombing range. They complain, resist a bit, but reluctantly agree to move out. Edward Abbey’s early novel, “Fire on the Mountain,” comes to mind.

In fact, a lot comes to mind while reading this meticulously crafted novel: the dynamic between haunting despair in Asia and hollow desolation in New Mexico, the rancid stench of war and the restiveness of each character at home. To paraphrase Willie Nelson, mamas, these are the cowboys you don’t want your babies grown up to be. But “In the Shadows of the Sun” is all back story and subtext with no drama front and center. It’s an antiwar novel in which major events slide in sideways, implicit, unspoken, while numb observations float by. On an overcrowded and suffocating prison ship, Jack’s skin is “crusted with filth, a beige scum of vomit and diarrhea and blood mixed and remixed that coated them all.”

About a third of the way through the novel, in early 1942, the folks at home receive a telegram telling them that Jack has been killed “in performance of his duties and service of his country.” Three years and more than 100 pages later, another telegram arrives. Turns out he’s still alive. Eventually, he returns to his family, “watching the river and drinking, and no one knew what to do with him.” Meanwhile, Jack’s relatives sneak onto the restricted bombing range and learn that ground zero of the Atomic Age was on the family’s former ranch, known today as the Trinity site on the sprawling White Sands Missile Range. “My daddy always said there wasn’t more than a thin sheet of sandpaper between this country and hell,” Jack’s uncle says at the site. “I just never figured him for literal till now.”

“In The Shadows of the Sun” is a difficult read at first, until you realize that the ghastly lunacy of war is not going to go away. But it has a steady drumbeat, a muffled rhythm that achieves an agreeable tempo by the second half. There is a whiff of having festered in too many writing workshops, a harmless condition that blanches strong, individual fiction to the anonymity of the universal creative writing school voice. Parsons should trust his own voice more and take advice less -- except from Miguel, Jack’s POW buddy from New Mexico, whose counsel on spiritual pilgrimages neatly sums up the book. Jack wonders why Miguel and his family labor on foot to a special sanctuary every year rather than simply go by car.

Miguel replies, “It’s the journey that matters. You must leave your life and make the journey so that you may renew your faith.”

*

Tom Miller is the author of numerous books, including “Trading With the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro’s Cuba” and “On the Border: Portraits of America’s Southwestern Frontier.”