Planting seeds of ambiguity

Allison Alsup’s richly detailed, atmospheric novel, “Foreign Seed,” transports us to a fascinating, unfamiliar time and place. Based on history and infused with mystery, her engrossing narrative, set in a turbulent warlord-ridden China, occurs over just seven days in 1918.

Alsup drops us into the story from the very first paragraph: “By the time Sokobin receives the Consul General’s wire, the American explorer has been missing some four days, and the affair is already well muddled. From what Sokobin can gather, Frank Meyer, 42, was last seen aboard the SS Feng Yang Maru, just before midnight on June 1.”

This is Sokobin’s first assignment, having just been promoted to vice consul. He is tasked with discovering what happened to Meyer, who was doing important work as a rugged explorer of the remote Chinese interior on behalf of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The new vice consul is clearly reluctant: “Sokobin stares at the paper, willing the words to evaporate. There’s no saying how long the search will take, if he can even find Meyer at all …The river is vast, and a body in the water leaves no trail, no trace, save itself.” But he notes that not every American who disappears wishes to be found. Furthermore, Sokobin believes, “There are only three ways a man ends up in the river. He can fall, jump, or be pushed. At the moment, none seems more likely than the other.”

Alsup builds a fully three-dimensional protagonist in broad and subtle strokes. Sokobin is a layered outsider. Far from relishing his new command, he dreads the responsibility. Being Jewish, coming from humble origins in Newark, and not being from the “right stock” set him apart. So, too, does his discomfort with the wealth and privilege of his university friend and Standard Oil executive, who is in China and helps host Sokobin during his quest for answers. Furthermore, he walks an awkward line, pushing against white Anglo-Saxon social norms by treating his enigmatic Chinese interpreter, Mr. Lin, with respect.

Alsup’s smaller details also bring Sokobin to life, such as his suffering from the oppressive heat and constant siren call of the cigarettes he carefully rations out for himself. The leitmotif of his addiction to Chesterfields, the soldier’s choice, skillfully links him to his brother Ethan, an airman fighting in Europe who failed to return after a night reconnaissance mission and whose plane was never found. The ambiguity of Ethan’s disappearance relentlessly haunts Sokobin. Alsup writes about his recurring vision:

“He can feel the fiery plane and the black sea waiting for him. A plane that may or may not be real flying over a black sea that may or may not exist. A brother who is neither here nor there, neither alive nor dead. And Sokobin’s own grief that cannot be grief, but a nameless pain and endless waiting whose only certainty is that it refuses to fade.”

Sokobin’s anguish about his brother is the doppelganger to the mystery of Meyer’s disappearance and potential fate, and the two become inexorably entwined, relentlessly plaguing his mind.

Sokobin, drawn initially to the romanticism of China instilled by his college professor, pushes up against the harsh reality of his experiences in China, which become a distinct and complex character in Alsup’s skilled hands. She writes as Sokobin watches an oncoming storm:

“Due east, clouds have begun to gather like sheep against the coming night … Suddenly, the futility of his nation’s purpose, of his purpose in China, hits him. The folly of thinking he might ever find a foothold in this vast country, of even hoping to understand it. It doesn’t matter how long he stays here, how much he learns. He’ll never be anything more than Meyer, an itinerant traveler at best, an outsider … How easily he’d fallen under its sway.”

Themes of friendship, family, and faith create the weft and warp in Alsup’s beautiful historical mystery. But paramount is Sokobin’s desire for answers — about Meyer’s fate and that of his brother — which raises the question for us all: Is it possible to live with ambiguity, in the gray between the definite and indefinite?

Alsup, who has taught writing at Featherstone Center for the Arts, wrote in a recent email, “What felt especially important to me during the writing is what psychologists now call ‘ambiguous loss’ — the idea that we don’t always get the answers we most desperately seek. Live long enough, and life will throw you into a serious loop for which there is no pat closure. Given that resolution isn’t guaranteed, how do we go forward in the face of such deeply felt uncertainty?”

“Foreign Seed: A Novel,” by Allison Alsup. Available at Edgartown Books. For more information, visit allisonalsup.com. Alsup will be interviewed by seasonal resident and author Elisa Speranza at the West Tisbury library on Thursday, Sept. 19, at 4:30 pm.