Marilynne Robinson won the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction for her wonderful third novel Home, a companion piece to the equally-wonderful, Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead.
Set at the same time in the same small, fictional Iowan community, Home brings into focus characters whose shadows tinge the earlier novel.
Like Gilead, Home is beautifully – or, to be more precise, perfectly – written. Each word has a job to do, and they all pull together into a whole that, put semi-algebraically, is much ? (its parts) x (everything unsaid yet, somehow, communicated).
Because I edit www.orangeprize.co.uk reading Gilead (longlisted 2004) and Home counted as work. After the profound joys of both of those I was utterly hooked and, once my 2009 Prize work was done, I dived into her first novel, Housekeeping. And that was it. I’d exhausted Robinson’s small-but-perfectly-formed fictional output.
It wasn’t enough, so I moved onto The Death of Adam (1998), a fierce and erudite collection of ‘essays on modern thought’. While much of the book is concerned with matters theological and historical (though explicitly linked to contemporary ethical issues) the penultimate article is a meditation on wildernesses and the terrible things governments do in them.
‘Wilderness,’ she writes, ‘is where things can be hidden’, in particular, nuclear things. The names of wild US places she reels off – ‘Idaho, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico’ – ‘are all notorious among those who know anything at all about nuclear weapons’. And ‘Look at England. They have put a plutonium factory and nuclear waste dump in the Lake District.’
Concluding with an appeal for us to give up our romantic attachment to the idea of wilderness and concentrate our energies instead on civilisation which, being broke, needs fixing (and, in any case, pollutes wilderness), this essay signposts the reader straight to Robinson’s earlier work of non-fiction – Mother Country: Britain, The Welfare State and Nuclear Pollution.
Published in 1989, and described in a 2008 interview in The Times as ‘the work she most wants to survive’, it’s a raging critique of the English Poor Laws, their evolution into the welfare state, and of Sellafield. How, Robinson asks, can a supposedly democratic government inflict Sellafield and its kin on us? How can it deny that the high local frequency of childhood leukaemia and other cancers is related to the radioactivity the plant emits? Why do the English tolerate its existence and appalling accident record? And why aren’t Americans aware of the dangers of visiting this popular holiday destination?
In her introduction, Robinson suggests that the British government couldn’t’ve imagined a future for their country, otherwise why would they home other nations’ nuclear (and other toxic) waste merely for profit? They ‘must know why other countries will pay good monies to be rid of the wastes Britain imports.’ She also fingers us as the biggest acid rain generator in Europe: our government didn’t ‘put filters on its coal-fired electrical plants because no economic use has been found for the filth they would trap’, and asks if ‘these policies would be acceptable to any government that looked forward even twenty years?’
Fast-forward twenty years.
If reading The Death of Adam felt like the intellectual equivalent of bumbling through an advanced pilates class without functioning stomach muscles, Mother Country felt like going fifteen rounds against Amir Khan before learning how to put on those big red mitten-things.
It was thoroughly discomforting because I’m one of the complacent Brits Robinson excoriates. Although terrifiedly aware of the dangers of nuclear power/weapons in my youth, I’d lost interest in, and sight of, the issue over the years. It’s tough being booted out of your comfort zone by an author whose soft-spoken novels are, it transpires, the velvet glove concealing the iron fist of her non-fiction. But it’s good for brain and soul and prompted me to find out if the safety of UK nuclear facilities has improved since Mother Country was published.
A cursory Google revealed that it hasn’t.
While the media was preoccupied with swine flu and MPs’ expenses – just days before we were swamped by reactions to Michael Jackson’s death.
The Observer revealed that between 2001-8 there were ‘more than 1,750 leaks, breakdowns or other “events”’ in Britain’s nuclear facilities (including Aldermaston and Burghfield in Berkshire) and that there aren’t enough qualified nuclear installation inspectors to regulate Britain’s plants.
Our ‘ratio of inspectors to nuclear plant is a third of the international average’: ie – dangerously crap. Meanwhile, at Sellafield, they’ve finally fixed a tank from which radioactive material seeped into the Irish Sea for anything up to fifty years. In 2007, at Sizewell A in Suffolk, a leak of up to 40,000 gallons of radioactive water was only discovered because someone working there decided to do some laundry and noticed a puddle. The alarm systems hadn’t worked. And there’s more. Google ‘nuclear accidents’ if you think you can bear that much reality.
So, now I know. I’m no longer unaware, no longer complacent. But what action should I take? What should I do?
What should we all do?
- Lisa Gee
Lisa Gee’s most recent book is Stage Mum, about how her 6 year old daughter accidentally ended up on the London Palladium stage in The Sound of Music.
She edits the Orange Prize for Fiction website, is the author of Friends: Why Men and Women Are From the Same Planet and the editor of Bricks Without Mortar: the selected poems of Hartley Coleridge.
You can follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LIS4G33
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4774827.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/21/nuclear-power-stations-inspector-watchdog
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/11/nuclear-waste-nuclearpower
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