Nuclear family fears

Press, 19 May 1984, Page 18

Nuclear family fears

The Burning Book. By Maggie Gee. Faber and Faber, 1983. 304 pp. $28.25. (Reviewed by Joan Curry) This is one of the densest novels I have ever read. By dense I mean closely woven, tightly controlled, with words and phrases hammered into the pages. The imagery is dazzling. Maggie Gee has an astonishing way of putting a story together and she has done this by confronting us with all our secret midnight fears and using them to tell the story of a nuclear family under nuclear threat.

The family, three or four generations of it, is ordinary. Its members are shop-keepers, watch-menders, supermarket assistants. They are full of inconsistencies and ambiguities, virtues and failings. They are so solid that they crowd and clamour and press against you. They give you no rest so that you must put down the book, if you can bear to, in order to think, to breathe. The novel covers the period of two

World Wars — perhaps that should read the first two World Wars. This family is flesh and blood, and during the telling of the story you are shockingly reminded of the flesh and blood of families in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The story is linked in terms of photographic images and you are forced to remember the images of the people printed on buildings with the flash of the Bomb nearly 40 years ago.

The members of this ordinary family, wrapped in their own concerns, become dimly aware of the smoke of the future blowing towards them. The television becomes frightening so they no longer watch it. They stop the newspapers so they don’t have to read about what is happening outside. Even the radio is turned off. So it happens that on the last day they behave as ordinary people behave, without awareness. “The last light shone with no one to see it. The final photograph made its print. Everything was on it, nothing escaped.” Maggie Gee has created an ending that has not happened — yet.