In his debut novel, Not Long Ago Persons Found, poet and fiction writer J. Richard Osborn invites us into a shadowy landscape in which the murder of a child impacts the governments of two unidentified countries. This novel is doubly enigmatic: the narrative atmosphere is mysterious, intimidating, and obscured by ambiguous events, and the narration itself is presented in oblique, often dreamlike language and fractured dialogue. All of these factors make for a unique and intriguing novel.
As a surprising counterpoint to this all-enveloping ambiguity, a vein of clear and accessible science runs through the heart of the tangled story. This is a tale of governmental intrigue wrapped around a detective story at the heart of which lies the science of forensic anthropology, calling to mind Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000).
In Osborn’s Not Long Ago Persons Found, the dismembered body of a seven-year-old boy is discovered in a river that runs through the two countries. The protagonists, a forensic anthropologist and her translator husband, the narrator, are tasked by their government with identifying the boy’s country of origin and, potentially, the perpetrator.
Their work is done both in the field in the boy’s suspected country of origin and in their own agency’s government lab in the investigators’ home country. When the husband and wife are in the country of origin, they also engage in a separate, clandestine investigation of mass graves recently created and denied by that government.
The enigma of the crime narrative is many-layered. We observe both the investigation of the boy’s murder and the secretive mass-grave research, as well as the interaction of the two governments, the actions of the police and paramilitaries, embedded agents, fixers, and spies within each country, including their own agency’s lab.Underlying these layers is the deeply odd relationship between the husband-and-wife investigators:
[S]he’d set out a bottle of bourbon, some ice and two classes.I … picked up the empty glasses, carried them to the sink, and threw them in.They shattered… [W]e called this ‘speaking through objects’.
Despite the immersive ambiguity of the crime narrative and the writing in Not Long Ago Persons Found, Osborn sets out the investigation’s forensic steps in clear and vivid detail. We learn that radioactive isotopes of minerals in the boy’s bones, mainly stemming from exposure to local rainwater, can identify the range of possible locations where he had lived. Where he is from can be further narrowed by analyzing pollen in the boy’s lungs, and marks on the pollen’s outer casings demonstrate the species of plant generating it. A Venn diagram would show where the regions of bone isotopes and pollen types intersect, pinning down the home location of the boy.
Where do all three pollen species intersect, where he could breathe in pollen from all three of them…[a]nd also, where the isotope profile … matches … his bones?Just one place.
Finally, if the victim had recently changed locations, the types of food and their positions within the digestive tract can show how long the victim had been away from home before being murdered.
The tale involves additional physical evidence, including the presence in the victim’s stomach of a particular type of small brown bean that creates total (other than verbal) paralysis. The evidence adduced by the investigating couple ultimately points to the boy’s place of origin, and to the victim’s relocation to where his murder occurred being so rapid that his travel must have been by airplane.
The investigators’ other, secret investigation uncovers evidence in a recently-dug mass grave that three persons appeared to have survived the massacre and fled. Yet, despite DNA evidence linking the two investigations, their agency supervisor, enlisting the help of friendly local media, adopts a simplistic theory not well-supported by the evidence in an attempt to force the investigation to shut down.
Osborn’s writing style keeps the reader on edge, with intentions and facts on the ground obscured by a veil of ambiguity of language, evidence, diction, and dialogue. He also layers in magical realism, where both husband and wife glimpse, on several occasions, the boy running on the street, complete with scars of reattachment:
[W]hat we’d seen…was the boy, … his head and hands and feet rejoined to his body at thin red lines, as if glued, the different parts moving not entirely in sync.
In the end, the narrator tells us that “a detective story is supposed to be about the restoration of order”, yet this Kafkaesque tale does not do so. However, a final cryptic scene implies that even though the investigators have been fired, their investigation continues.
Set in an unidentified time and place and written in a style whose opacity perfectly mirrors the narrator’s tale, this novel teaches that those in authority can manipulate brute facts, including those demonstrated by settled science. The powerful will reach their desired outcome, and overcoming this power requires perseverance in the face of intimidation.
In Not Long Ago Persons Found, demonstrable evidence of facts does not serve as the bedrock of what is presented by authorities as the truth. In this regard, the world of Osborn’s novel is eerily recognizable.
These lessons, and this novel, are both important and timely.
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