Nuclear Afternoon: True Stories of Atomic Disaster Book

Through some accident of timing or subject matter or genre, this book has been easy to marginalize. Picking it up in my desire to be a Marilynne Robinson completist, even I was rather stunned at how, for lack of a better word, relevant it proved to be.

Written shortly before the end of the Cold War, Mother Country looks beyond the framing of geopolitical and ideological rivalry that characterized that period, the collapse of which led to two decades of short-sighted or dishonest optimism, to tell a shocking story of how governments and their associated experts interact with their people. Two stories, really: the first a retelling of the origins of the British welfare state, the second an exposé of Britain's Sellafield nuclear complex and its discharge of toxic and radioactive materials into the sea and air.

The vices she identifies in social thought, journalism, government, and industry-affiliated science are every bit in evidence, even more so, today than they are in Robinson's own account. The exponents of the Poor Laws and their brutish restrictions and disciplines on poor workers are immediately recognizable in a tradition continued by Charles Murray and Paul Ryan (and a hundred more lions of opinion-page morality). The crass dilemma between "jobs" and environmental justice, which is no dilemma at all where the people are used up no less than the soil and water, is exploited reliably today. And these things happen against a background of weird quiescence and credulity. "The apparatus of democracy becomes a sort of Soviet constitution in every instance where there is no will to animate it." People didn't want to hear this in 1989, it seems, but we should definitely try to hear it now.

Mother Country strikes me as something like a Rosetta Stone for Robinson's non-fiction work since, which is widely regarded as uneven. The topics and themes she seems continually to be circling in her essays, striking from one direction or another, are treated more fully here (though spoiler alert: there is no mention of John Calvin). That fuller treatment makes, in my opinion anyway, a better case for their urgency and for the preoccupation that apparently resulted than can be expected from the essays. And it gives a picture of the problem she looks to some of her later touchstones, be they John Calvin or the Old Testament or Shakespeare, to provide resources for answering.

That may or may not be persuasive, but the problem of the disproportion of our public ideologies and practices to the requirements of human decency and flourishing is very real and urgent, and this book puts it in a harsh and penetrating light.