The Book of Ash by James Flint, Viking/Penguin, 拢12.99, ISBN 0670914924
The Radioactive Boyscout by Ken Silverstein, Fourth Estate, 拢12.99, ISBN 1841152293 Reviewed by Mike Holderness
THE WHOLE point of reviewing non-fiction is to give the end away: 鈥渢he Hox genes did it, and here鈥檚 how鈥︹�� This approach would be a bad plan with a novel as full of small, perfectly formed suspenses as The Book of Ash is.
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We open as Cooper James is pelted by the Yorkshire rain, or, more exactly, as 鈥淪ome kind of bunker-seeking precipitation missile tunnels down inside my collar and obliterates secret forces bivouacked along the wind-scoured cliffside of my neck.鈥� He is outside the American spy base where he works: 鈥淭he reason I can鈥檛 tell you what my job is is I don鈥檛 know myself. That鈥檚 one of the things that having a security clearance means.鈥�
We discover a little more about his geek personality thus: 鈥淚 think I鈥檝e got toxoplasmosis鈥� I read about it in New 杏吧原创. I think it might explain why I have difficulty concentrating.鈥�
I thoroughly recommend that you take my word for it 鈥� backed by these small examples of James Flint鈥檚 dry, thoroughly researched wit and way with surreal but precise description. Buy the book to find out what happens next. If you don鈥檛 want to know the score, look away now.
Still here? OK. The Book of Ash is inspired by the work of artist James Acord, and his quest to make art out of nuclear waste. The Acord figure is notably absent, and sought after. Not very thoroughly buried here is a fine road movie 鈥� Fear and Loathing in Los Alamos, perhaps.
For more picaresque radioactivity, we turn to The Radioactive Boy Scout, a book-length expansion of a Harper鈥檚 Magazine article about David Hahn.
He was the teenager who took the 1950s promise of atomic energy so seriously that he decided to breed uranium-233 from the thorium in lantern mantles 鈥� in a backyard in Commerce Township, Michigan. Journalist Ken Silverstein should have let it be: in pasting in a slew of background he has introduced scads of irritating errors.
For example, arranging a nuclear explosion remains non-trivial even if you have the fissile material to hand. Why didn鈥檛 he let Hahn proofread it?