All That Is Solid Darragh Mckeon Read Online
Red Alert
The nucleus of "All That Is Solid Melts Into Air," Darragh McKeon'due south whirling first novel, is the Chernobyl nuclear accident, a catastrophe that embodies the political, economical and moral bankruptcy of the waning Soviet Union. McKeon makes it the center of a much larger, interconnected story, every bit the smashing Soviet writer Vasily Grossman did with the Boxing of Stalingrad in "Life and Fate."
Artyom, a boy in a village not far from Chernobyl, wakes to discover the heaven replaced with red. "It looks as if the earth's chaff has been turned within out, equally if molten lava hangs weightless over the state." Enough time in 20th-century Eastern Europe has inured his father to the unbelievable, and he is less easily impressed: "It's the same sky we've e'er lived under. It'due south merely in a different mood."
Meanwhile, firefighters who take never heard of radioactive decay arrive to Chernobyl in shirt sleeves. They begin to vomit, but without "panicked crowds to confirm their individual fears" they push misgivings aside. A technician finds the power constitute'due south first-aid room barren considering to prepare for such a jumbo disaster would be to suggest that it could occur, and to make such a proposition is politically unthinkable.
The flight from the towns and countryside surrounding Chernobyl is the almost harrowing description of displacement I've read since the Dunkirk evacuation in Ian McEwan'due south "Atonement." Pages of the strange, surreal and horrific pass with the authenticity of raw news footage. Only one box of iodine pills is available for a city of lx,000, and so the elderly pass around contaminated milk, believing information technology volition fortify them against radiation. The military responds to the humanitarian crisis past sending in fighter jets and robots designed for Mars exploration. Dogs are shot in front end of their owners by soldiers who see themselves as war heroes. A woman fills a jar with dirt from her parents' grave, only to be told the earth beneath her feet has been polluted.
A book billed equally an "end-of-empire novel" might easily lose both reader and graphic symbol in the high-altitude, low-oxygen air of abstraction, especially when the empire in question is the largest state in recent history. Later all, how to portray the final era of an empire spanning eleven fourth dimension zones if not broadly? But it's moments similar these that make "All That Is Solid Melts Into Air" such a startling achievement. Even as McKeon cuts a wide swath, his scenes, characters and story lines build every bit the gradual aggregating of the detail.
In one such episode, Artyom's father tries to bring an unhinged door onto a omnibus crowded with evacuees. The soldiers are initially as nonplused as the reader, until they see a series of numbers carved into the wood and realize the door records the diverse heights of his children. The door has likewise held the bodies of his parents at their wakes. He shows the soldiers "the notches, the names, the tribal markings cogent the history of the thing, the merely object he has ever cared for, a slab of grooved timber on which his own dead trunk will residuum, until, midsentence, one of the soldiers steps up and stuns the butt of his gun into the man's olfactory organ."
It's a small moment, merely one indicative of McKeon's narrative stance as a whole. By investing objects and settings with a history of individual triumphs and disappointments, he wrings surprising emotional depth from the mundane. And by proving that stories too intimate to ever brand their style into the history books are nonetheless worth telling, the novel makes a powerful argument that no ane is unremarkable.
Grigory, a surgeon whose story later dovetails with Artyom's, leaves the relative sanity of his Moscow-surface area infirmary to assistance in the evacuation. At that place he becomes a splinter of decency lodged within the cruel and incompetent government response. At the operations middle, the M.G.B. has blocked outbound calls, fearing the public relations disaster more than the environmental ane. Grigory breaks into a nearby apartment and calls private families at random from a phone book to warn of the dispersing radiations deject. At that place'southward upwardly to 150 names on each page of the telephone book, and he reaches only lx before he's cut off. Modest acts of defiance, however futile, provide these characters a sense of identity separate from the political organisation they serve, fifty-fifty if it's only the sensation that decency will be their downfall.
Post-Chernobyl, the narrative shifts between a resettlement camp ("what a urban center would look like if y'all took abroad all the walls and article of furniture") and Moscow, where Grigory's estranged wife, Maria, atones for personal and political transgressions. She is peradventure the most complicated of the many characters populating these pages. Both her journalism career and her marriage end when her editor links her to subversive samizdat, and later coerces her into an thing under the threat of ruining Grigory. When we outset see Maria, she'south been relegated to a factory flooring where she presently risks the future of her nephew, a piano prodigy, in a misguided act of resistance. It forces both her and usa to re-evaluate our understanding of ethical choice when principles and pragmatism diverge.
Maria'due south story highlights ane of the few shortcomings of this richly envisioned and thoroughly researched novel. All the central characters are victimized past the state, but they are rarely complicit in its crimes. Who isn't going to sympathize wholeheartedly with a surgeon saving those the government has discarded? Or a bullied 9-year-old whose shorts fall off during a gym class rope climb? But the corrupted censor of a land can replicate itself within the censor of even the virtually well-intentioned individual. Greater attending paid to the corrosive politics of the private sphere, where the government's betrayals are carried out by friends, neighbors and family, might have complicated the question at the heart of the novel: How should we human activity when personal and societal moralities conflict?
This seems peculiarly noticeable in the second half of the novel, when the momentum McKeon has advisedly built divides and dissipates among multiple subplots. Merely it'due south hard to find fault in a novel so fearless. If McKeon's imaginative reach at times exceeds his structural grasp, this feels less similar the avoidable missteps of a rookie than the inevitable fissures of a seasoned novelist pushing confronting the boundaries of his form.
A coda set in 2011 shows that while the lives of these characters may have transformed, the new Russian state looks much like its predecessor. What began with a meltdown ends with music, and in a surprising turn, we come up to empathise that time is a solvent that tin convert even failure into states of grace. McKeon'south characters may already have receded into history, simply by imprinting their triumphs and tragedies onto the imagination with such visceral empathy, he has given them a deserving afterlife in this powerful novel.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/books/review/darragh-mckeons-all-that-is-solid-melts-into-air.html
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