The Great Explosion by Brian Dillon: a masterful account of a terrible disaster in a remarkable place In April 1916, shortly before the commencement of the Battle of the Somme, a fire started in a vast munitions works located in the Kentish marshes. The resulting series of explosions killed 108 people and injured many more. In a brilliant piece of storytelling, Brian Dillon recreates the events of that terrible day - and, in so doing, sheds a fresh and unexpected light on the British home front in the Great War. He offers a chilling natural history of explosives and their effects on the earth, on buildings, and on human and animal bodies. And he evokes with vivid clarity one of Britain's strangest and most remarkable landscapes - where he has been a habitual explorer for many years. The Great Explosion is a profound work of narrative, exploration and inquiry from one of our most brilliant writers. 'The Great Explosion is exhilarating and moving and lyrical. It is a quiet evisceration of a landscape through the discovery of a lost history of destructiveness, a meditation on Englishness, an autobiography, a mapping of absences. I loved it.' Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes ''What a fascinating, unclassifiable, brilliant book, confirming Brian Dillon's reputation as one of our most innovative and elegant non-fictioneers. No one else could have written it.' Robert Macfarlane, author of The Old Ways 'Forensic, fascinating, endlessly interesting' Philip Hoare, Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author of Leviathan andThe Sea Inside 'A subtle, human history of the early twentieth century ... Explosions are a fruitful subject in Dillon's hands, one that enables him to reflect movingly on the instant between life and death, on the frailty of human endeavour, and on the readiness of nations to tear one another apart. The Great Explosion deftly covers a tumultuous period of history while centring on the tiniest moments - just punctuation marks in time' Financial Times '[Dillon's] account of the Faversham explosion is as bold as it is dramatic, while his descriptive passages about the marshlands of Kent are so evocative that you can practically feel the mud sticking at your feet' Evening Standard 'A brilliant evocation of place grasped in its modernity' Guardian 'Dillon ... has a WG Sebald-like gift for interrogating the landscape ... a work of real elegiac seriousness that goes to the heart of a case of human loss and destruction in England's sinister pastures green' Ian Thomson, Irish Times
Industry Reviews
It's so good that, after reading it, I needed a lie-down -- Hilary Mantel * Guardian Books of the Year (on Tormented Hope) *
Written with great elegance and shrewd understanding, it illuminates a condition that probably all of us will suffer from at some time in our lives -- William Boyd * Guardian Books of the Year (on Tormented Hope) *
A mini-masterpiece * Observer (on Tormented Hope) *
Illuminating, humane and beautiful * Independent (on Tormented Hope) *
[Dillon's] main interest lies in the discovery that these natural wastes are also littered with the often strangely inscrutable debris of various human projects. More like a derelict art installation than a conventional landscape, his marsh is a place where semi-wild horses graze among derelict remnants of brick and concrete, where the howling wind uses rusted wire as a gibbet on which to hang tattered fragments of plastic from the sea, and where you can walk on paths that have outlasted the buildings and jetties to which they once led. For some, these once-malarial wetlands may be no more than a vast brownfield site waiting for another round of development. Dillon, however, recognises them as the true face of a nation "haunted" by its military-industrial past: a habitat not just of plants and wild creatures but of peopled "stories" that can never be pulled fully clear of the mud. ... a brilliant evocation of place grasped in its modernity * Guardian *
A subtle, human history of the early twentieth century ... Explosions are a fruitful subject in Dillon's hands, one that enables him to reflect movingly on the instant between life and death, on the frailty of human endeavour, and on the readiness of nations to tear one another apart. The Great Explosion deftly covers a tumultuous period of history while centring on the tiniest moments - just punctuation marks in time * Financial Times *
[Dillon's] account of the Faversham explosion is as bold as it is dramatic, while his descriptive passages about the marshlands of Kent are so evocative that you can practically feel the mud sticking at your feet * Evening Standard *
Dillon ... has a WG Sebald-like gift for interrogating the landscape ... a work of real elegiac seriousness that goes to the heart of a case of human loss and destruction in England's sinister pastures green * Irish Times *
A compelling account of a little-known aspect of British history * Irish Examiner *
Instead of a piece of nature writing, The Great Explosion is an excavation - not of a landscape but of a kind of estuary modernism, an account of what Dillon calls the "unnatural history" of the Kent marshes and its associations with the manufacture of high explosives. ... The result is exhilarating... The Great Explosion is a barrage of stimulating connections, digressions and narrative about-turns that is both fundamentally strange and utterly beguiling. * Literary Review *
