Taking in McCarthyism, personal and political distrust, constraints on women in mid-century America and fundamental moral questions around power and betrayal, this ambitious novel is as complex as its subject, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist who co-created the atomic bomb.
Hailed a hero for his role in developing the bomb, then denounced for his Communist Party connections, this discloses Oppenheimer’s contradictions through the perspectives of seven varied and compelling characters at different points in time. The secret service agent who trails Oppenheimer remarks that “another person is a mystery”, and this novel certainly bears that out with its positing of a fundamental question - can we ever truly know another person? Illuminating and thought-provoking, this is a fine work of historical fiction with intellectual bite and emotional resonance.
'Brilliant . . . Hall has shaped a richly imagined, tremendously moving fictional work. Its genius is not to explain but to embody the science and politics that shaped Oppenheimer's life . . .The resulting quantum portrait feels both true and dazzlingly unfamiliar' New York Times J. Robert Oppenheimer - the father of the atomic bomb - was a brilliant scientist, a champion of liberal causes, and a complex and often contradictory character. In Louisa Hall's kaleidoscopic novel, seven fictional characters bear witness to his life. From a secret service agent who tailed him in San Francisco, to the young lover of a colleague in Los Alamos, to a woman fleeing McCarthyism who knew him on St. John, as these men and women fall into the orbit of a brilliant but mercurial mind at work, all consider his complicated legacy while also uncovering deep and often unsettling truths about their own lives. In Trinity, Louisa Hall has crafted an explosive story about what it means to truly know someone, and about the secrets we keep from the world and from ourselves.
