D: Heavy Water, by Neal Stephenson
The popularity of Neal Stephenson’s books is an ongoing riposte to the idea that readers are no longer capable of feats of sustained attention. Intimidatingly long and packed with abstruse information, his novels are cherished for their intellectual breadth, their world-building and their weird prescience: They have anticipated, among other things, the metaverse and cryptocurrency.
“D: Heavy Water” is the second volume in the planned Bomb Light trilogy, a historical epic about the race to make the first atomic bomb. The first volume, “Polostan,” introduced us to Aurora, a young Russian American woman. Recruited by Soviet intelligence, she was tasked toward the end of that novel with seducing a Moscow-based British journalist called Owen Crisp-Upjohn. “D: Heavy Water” takes over the narrative at this point, in 1934, with Owen supplanting Aurora as the story’s protagonist.
“A footloose, globe-hopping, fop journalist,” Owen is a shallow product of the British elite who has been hired to write lighthearted articles to boost the circulation of his newspaper. His career highlight so far is a dispatch from the Amazon “about the removal of a parasite from his urethra with a corkscrew and a book of matches.”
It’s a good joke to have such an unserious person in the middle of a grave historical moment. The world of “D: Heavy Water” is riven by the ideological experiments of Nazism and communism. Advances in nuclear science, understood by a tiny number of people, are about to put unthinkable power in the hands of whoever is first to exploit it. The “heavy water” of the title is the isotope of deuterium that is essential to the manufacture of nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, Owen is getting drunk, falling into Soviet honey traps and trying to ferret out noncontentious subjects for color pieces about life in Russia. A romance with Aurora appears to be in the cards, but is cut short when Owen’s London editor assigns him the task of tracking down a charismatic British aristocrat who has vanished: Charles Howard, known as Mad Jack, who is both the 20th Earl of Suffolk and the 13th Earl of Berkshire. Owen sets off for Australia to find him.
It turns out that Charles Howard was a real person. Stephenson deserves great credit for rescuing this extraordinary figure from oblivion. In 1940, Howard attempted to spirit the world’s entire stock of heavy water out of France from under the noses of the advancing Germans. This mission forms the climax of the novel and sets up future installments of the story.
But before we get there, Owen has dispatches to file, missions to accomplish and a romance to rekindle. The novel roams beside him across the intellectual and geographical world of the 1930s, from Moscow to Kurdistan, Australia, Spain, France and Norway, unearthing strange historical episodes, like pioneering Soviet balloon flights and the abortive 1936 People’s Olympiad in Barcelona.
It’s a really tantalizing setup. Stephenson has identified an incredible series of overlooked world events and found a character who seems like the perfect avatar to travel through them on our behalf. Owen promises to be a more benign and foppish version of George Macdonald Fraser’s Harry Flashman, the satirical cad who becomes an accidental participant in defining moments of world history.
However, as we go further into the book, Stephenson appears to lose interest in Owen, whose initial brio is replaced by a frustrating passivity. And there’s a general lack of urgency in the storytelling, which is held up by long descriptive passages and turns too often on coincidences.
Another issue is the prose. This is a typical line: “Which, come to think of it, did raise the question of why Giralt had such oddly specific and certain information about something that must have been quite low on his list of priorities this evening.” Elizabeth Strout said once that every sentence should have a heartbeat; if so, this one needs a defibrillator. Flat, information-heavy writing is characteristic of the book and a feature of its dialogue. “Radon, for example,” explains one character, “is in the far-right column of the table, so its behavior in the chemistry lab is similar to that of helium even though helium is only one-fiftieth of radon’s weight.”
The romance between Aurora and Owen remains perfunctory and underexplored. There is a deep passion at the heart of this book, but it’s for explaining and describing things. When Owen is separated from Aurora, his first thought about her is sexual, his second is to tell her “everything about modern steel-hulled wool clippers.”
A lot of energy has gone into researching this book, a lot less into the writing, plotting and depictions of character. This idiosyncratic choice of priorities means that, for all of the novel’s promise, the fascinating historical moments never achieve fusion as a satisfying work of art.
D: Heavy Water | By Neal Stephenson | William Morrow | 435 pp. | $32
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