The Bone Sharps

by Tim Bowling

Tim Bowling’s new novel is a fictionalized account of the life and work of Charles Sternberg (1850–1943), student of the renowned American proto-paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope. Contrasting the astonishing discoveries made in the bonefields of the Alberta badlands and the American plains with the chaos and destruction in the trenches of the First World War, The Bone Sharps evokes the pivotal transition from the nineteenth-century world of order and faith to the uncertainties of the modern era.

As the novel opens, Sternberg leads a new generation into the badlands to collect and identify dinosaur bones. By night he is haunted by his previous exploits and by the ghost of his daughter, Maud, who died while working for one of his colleagues. Sternberg is not the only sleepless soul in the camp. Lily, a young assistant on the expedition, has had no mail from Sternberg’s protege, Scott Cameron, who is fighting in the trenches in France; she fears the worst. As the novel progresses, Bowling brings to life this fascinating period in scientific exploration, reaching back to the “Bone Wars” that took place between Edward Drinker Cope and his rival Othniel Marsh in the late nineteenth century as the two men criss-crossed the American West in search of new species and the notoriety that came with discovery. In the sun-drenched flats, the violent skirmishes and the candlelight of tents, Bowling brings readers into the world of early paleontology through the life of one of its most prolific forerunners.

According to the author: "In the spring of 1999, along with my wife Theresa and our seven-month-old son Dashiell, I spent five weeks looking after our friends’ eighty-acre ranch just outside of Dinosaur Provincial Park in southeastern Alberta. During those five magical weeks in the ancient, eerie badlands landscape, I began to read some books about the region that our friends kept on their shelves. Immediately, I was drawn to the tales of the pioneer paleontologists. Their painstaking labours to extract and preserve dinosaur fossils in all that majesty of space and silence at the same time that western civilization was mired in the carnage and cacophony of World War I seemed both heroic and poignant. Especially moving to me was the life of Charles Sternberg, a deeply religious American bone hunter who, with his three sons, had been hired by the Canadian government to find and preserve some of the Alberta badlands’ rich dinosaur heritage for our country’s museums. Over time, I began to see Sternberg – as well as his mentor, Edward Drinker Cope – as gatekeepers to a time of faith that twentieth-century science and warfare would effectively destroy. Their struggles to celebrate the spiritual through scientific discovery seemed as ancient and fragile as the bones they hungered to uncover. Such individuals seemed to stand with one foot in the distant centuries and the other in the modern age."

Genres: Canada

303 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2007

Reviews

[Leo Robillard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tim Bowling is best known as a poet, perhaps even one of the country’s greatest. And those talents are in evidence in The Bone Sharps, his third novel.

There are essentially three stories operating within this volume, concentrating on three different characters and several different time periods. We meet Charles Sternberg in 1876 at the outset of his career as a palaeontologist, scouring the chalk lands of Montana for fossils. We track his progress into 1896, through the death of his only daughter, and that of his benefactor and mentor Professor Cope. And we see him again in 1916, still bent over the badlands, searching – this time in Alberta – haunted by his past and grievously ill.

We also follow the story of Scott, Sternberg’s one-time protégé – now locked in the trenches of Europe burrowing for survival rather than discovery – and Lily, labouring with Sternberg in 1916, writing to Scott and loving him from a distance. We also follow Lily toward the end of her own life in 1975, on a strange personal journey.

Few writers can wield language with the facility and acuity of Bowling. With him, even the most mundane and trivial become surprising and new. In Banff, the "mountains were black, inlaid with blue-green, and surrounded the town like the sides of a tea-cup." Sitting in a restaurant, Lily thinks "the men’s voices buzzed like flies, and she waved quickly at her ears to rid herself of the sound."

The landscapes, whether they be the blasted, incandescent badlands of Alberta, or the muddy, treacherous trenches of France come to life here.

However, this same power of observation can work to Bowling’s detriment as well. Certain passages carry the weight of their descriptions. Paragraphs stretch on ponderously for several pages. As well, the reader cannot help but feel that Bowling is balancing a little too much in this novel. Timelines become confusing, stories bleed into one another.

Oddly, Bowling may even have wanted this effect, for surely one of the novel’s themes is the palimpsest – how the same landscapes are worked and reworked and the past is never far from the surface.

To be sure, The Bone Sharps requires your full attention, but is, in the end, a rewarding read.

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lyrical historical fiction about the 'Bone Wars' - a sort of idealogical/paleontological war between two early archeologists (Cope and Marsh) who spent their lives unearthing prehistoric fossils from the badlands of western North America. Wagon roads, unruly horses, the ever-present threat of Indians. The story also follows the life of one of Cope's proteges: Charles Sternberg. We learn the arc of Sternberg's life - from field assistant to veteran and esteemed bone sharp. And then the third generation emerges - Lily and Scott. Working as field hands in the badlands of Alberta, the two form a tentative relationship that is put on hold due to Scott's conscription to the battle fields in France. Woven through the book is a poetic lust for nature, for the scent of sage, and the rugged landscape of the badlands. A mysticism towards God and creation, of evolution and extinction, of the worship of the wonders of life. Of love, of wars, of brutality, of horrors, despair, loss. This is an important book, and the execution belies the potentially dry and tedious nature of academia and archeology.