The Preacher's Son

...Whether seeking shelter with von Rothman from the bombing in the tunnels under the streets of Madrid decorated to simulate the progression of a bullfight and ending in a fantastic necropolis, or, on the Chinese front, tying down a patient who for superstitious reasons refuses to donate his blood and drawing it by force, this is when Bethune feels most alive...

...In Bock’s retelling, the baser elements of Bethune’s character, revealed in his personal memoir found in seven envelopes after his death, prompt the Propaganda Committee to recommend that Mao suppress the memoir in favor of “a brief, more idealized biography or political eulogy of the subject...

...There he meets the Hungarian photographer Robert Capa...

...Fresh from an astounding success in Spain, where his picture, “Death of a Loyalist Soldier,” became instantly iconic, Capa has come to China in search of newmaterial...

...But no matter how appalled he is by the slaughter, by far the bulk of his memoir takes place against the backdrop of war— the wars in Spain and in China, though both of them together amount to no more than the last three years of his life...

...In Spain, Bethune comments on the contemptuous attitude of a Castilian doctor on his staff: “It always seemed to me that he felt we were crashing his war...

...It is the same form that Marilynne Robinson uses in Gilead—a father looking back over his life, probing his deepest motivations, and confessing his failures in a letter to his child...

...He is, reportedly, the only Westerner honored there with statues as well as a memorial for bringing the medical units he created (the prototype for MASH/Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals) to the frontlines of battle and ministering tirelessly to the wounded deep in the country’s interior during the second Japanese invasion...

...The answer, of course, is that he had always been his father, merely exchanging one religion for another, but practicing it with no less certitude and intolerance...

...The most haunting one, perhaps, is that of a young girl trapped with no hope of rescue under the rubble of a collapsed building for 12 days when Bethune gets to her, her mother sitting beside her the entire time, speaking and singing to her, “caressing her hair” until the end...

...His birthplace in Gravenhurst, Ontario, has been transformed into a national historical site...

...Images of war are a specialty of Bethune’s as well...

...The passages in which Bethune imagines the quality time they might have together if they were ever to meet come across as conventional and generic...

...The daughter who did not exist in reality does not exist on the page either, yet Bock raises the stakes even higher by zooming in on her in the title, loading her with meaning that is hard to justify...

...Yet despite the weight of the heavy research required for a novel of this sort that sometimes shows through, and despite the risk and the sheer presumption of giving a well-documented figure an inner voice that sometimes strains belief, this is an exceptionally interesting and meticulously crafted book, noble in spirit and serious in purpose...

...The Preacher’s Son The Communist’s Daughter By Dennis Bock Knopf...

...AS HE makes his way into the heart of China, to Yan’an, in Shensi Province, the command post of his revered Mao Zedong (who has a cameo appearance in an almost religiously illuminated account of their only meeting), Bethune stops for a time in Hankou, the temporary headquarters of Chiang Kai-shek, whom he despises...

...God had been left dead in that wasteland,” Bethune reflects afterward...

...Years later, in China, those are the very words he contemplates uttering when, following the destruction by the Japanese of his model “demonstration hospital” built in an abandoned Buddhist temple, he vents his fury on his beloved aide, Ho, who is almost like a son to him...

...Bethune’s father, like his son, was headstrong, self-righteous, hottempered, and the two of them were locked in a painful conflict that shaped the younger Bethune’s entire existence...

...THE MEMOIR takes the form of a letter to his infant daughter whom he has never seen, born after he was forced to leave Spain under some suspicion due to his relationship with the child’s mother, Kajsa von Rothman, a Swede who may have been a spy...

...Those “vulgar interests” that Mao claimed Bethune to be above are, among other things, precisely what Canadian novelist Dennis Bock explores in The Communist’s Daughter, his high-minded and fascinating reimagining of the life and motivations of this complex ideologue doctor without borders...

...Bock tells of how Norman, still a boy in his father’s house, undergoes a life altering epiphany as he observes the decomposing remains of a gull: “I realized in an instant that I was completely alone in the world, and that all that my father had taught me about the Good Book and angels and the Resurrection was lies...

...These, however, are the years in which he lives with the greatest day-today intensity and finds redemptive meaning...

...Had I become my father...

...The elderly Iowa preacher’s son in Robinson’s novel, however, is fully integrated into the story, whereas the Communist’s daughter here is more an idea of a child as symbol of absolution and renewal...

...A more apt title for his book might have been “The Preacher’s Son” because, like the Robinson novel, this is the testimony of a man of faith—namely, Norman Bethune, the Communist who also happened to be the son of a Presbyterian minister...

...Bock crashes wars to find his subjects, and in The Communist’s Daughter he crashes a real life...

...he asks himself...

...There are accounts of Bethune’s involvement with von Rothman in Madrid, where he had gone to support the Republican cause and where he was credited with one of the great wartime innovations, mobile blood transfusion units, but there is no record of a child...

...His announcement at dinner soon afterward that he has cast off his father’s faith leads to a furious thrashing that he never forgets and never truly forgives...

...The author neatly dates this imaginary recommendation two days before Mao’s actual eulogy was promulgated, and includes among its signers several individuals who crossed paths with Bethune, among them his interpreter and a woman comrade who had a glimpse into the good doctor’s cold and vindictive side...

...for Capa, for Bethune and for Bock, too, it is a creative turnon...

...Nevertheless, this letter to that child, typed up in China under conditions of grinding privation on a battered old Remington with a threadbare ribbon ingeniously restored each night by his loyal young aide, Ho, offers a way for Bock to give Bethune an interior voice...

...Children are the heritage of the Lord,” he hears his father saying as he collapses over him...

...Reviewed by Tova Reich Author, “Mara,” “Master of the Return,” “The Jewish War,” “My Holocaust” (spring 2007) Every schoolchild in China has heard of the Canadian physician Norman Bethune...

...Like Bock’s two previous novels, Olympia, a multigenerational story featuring German athlete grandparents who competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and The Ash Garden, set against the background of Hiroshima, with one of its characters a creator of the atomic bomb and another its victim, The Communist’s Daughter unfolds against some of the bloodiest battlefields of the first half of the 20th century—World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and the occupation of China by Japan...

...The easy course for a writer in fictionalizing the life of a hero such as Bethune would be to knock him off his pedestal by defining him entirely through his weaknesses and failings, his “vulgar interests,” in order to humanize him...

...On December 21, 1939, shortly after his death at age 49 from blood poisoning contracted when he cut his ungloved hand while operating, Mao Zedong issued a eulogy entitled “In Memory of Norman Bethune,” later included in the “Three Constantly Read Articles,” politically correct texts for elementary school on up...

...Whatever might have survived of traditional faith after his confrontation with his father is thoroughly eviscerated during World War I while Bethune serves as a stretcher bearer for the Canadian Army in Belgium, where he is witness to the stupefying carnage, memorably described by Bock...

...Using as markers actual and invented facts from Bethune’s life to drive forward his narrative, Bock animates a character who, yes, is overbearing, arrogant, possibly humorless, rigid in his convictions and ruthless in implementing them, probably a womanizer and maybe even an alcoholic, yet is extraordinarily inventive and energetic as a physician, endowed with an artist’s introspectiveness and powers of observation, capable of intense personal feelings of tenderness and love, and possessed by genuine outrage at universal injustice and suffering...

...We must all learn the spirit of absolute selflessness from him,” Mao declared in the closing lines of the eulogy...

...With this spirit everyone can be very useful to the people...

...A personal journal could have done an equally credible job of getting into his soul, and been far less contrived...

...A man’s ability may be great or small, but if he has this spirit, he is already noble-minded and pure, a man of moral integrity and above vulgar interests, a man who is of value to the people...

...Unlike those two earlier works, though, the new book has as its main character a real person, the distinguished thoracic surgeon Norman Bethune, whose memory is venerated for his medical and humanitarian contributions not only in China but also, despite his Communism, in his native Canada...

...War inspires...

...This is a pitfall Bock intelligently avoids...