The Ondaatje prize is given by the Royal Society of Literature to a book by a citizen of the Commonwealth or Ireland that best evokes the spirit of a place, and since place is what I’m into right now, I thought I’d try one of the titles on this year’s shortlist: Brian Dillon’s The Great Explosion, whose setting is the eerie north Kent marshlands. I imagined that it might link, in turn, to David Seabrook’s out-of-print Kentish odyssey All the Devils Are Here – which, incidentally, has recently rocketed in price. Before I talked about it on the Backlisted podcast and wrote about it here, you could pick up a copy for a few quid. Now, like strange contraband, a tatty paperback will set you back £35.
But back to The Great Explosion. Its starting point is a terrible accident that occurred at Uplees, near Faversham, on 2 April 1916, when two local gunpowder factories were working overtime to produce the munitions demanded by the war. A fire, which may have started in a pile of sacks, ignited a building in which TNT was (stupidly) stored next to ammonium nitrate – and so, boom, the great explosion of the book’s title. Its effects could be felt in Great Yarmouth. At the site itself, the factories completely disappeared, replaced by a crater 14ft deep. There were 108 deaths.
Dillon, who is Irish, is living in Kent by default, and has previously maintained a “sullen indifference” to its countryside. Now, though, he is (appropriately) on fire, his excited explorations in marked contrast to the saturated lands he has taken to wandering. His book is a history of the gunpowder industry in Britain, and a meditation on the nation’s industrial past; it is also, he writes, “a story about flatness, and the way that sound and force and information – maybe also memory – travel across such level ground”.
Along the way, though, he makes several intriguing detours: here is Marcel Duchamp holidaying at Herne Bay; here is Russell Hoban, writing his 1980 post-apocalypse novel, Riddley Walker; and here is Derek Jarman in his garden at Dungeness. Evocative and melancholy, The Great Explosion is a singular book, odd in all the right ways.
