The Riders – Tim Winton

Fred Scully, wife, Jennifer, and young daughter, Billie have left a settled life in Perth, Australia to tour Europe. Jennifer has given up a well-paid job in order to give rein to her creative urge to be a writer, poet, painter or something equally artistic. Scully accommodates her, taking on casual labouring jobs to put food on the table. Then on a whim they (or she) decide to buy a rundown bothy they stumble over in rural Ireland. It is a wreck and while the girls return to Australia to sell up and settle affairs, Scully knuckles down to making the uninhabitable habitable.

That is where chapter one kicks in as Scully spends weeks in the cold wet wilderness working and living hard with only the local postie for company. It’s done by mid-December, but when Scully waits at Shannon Airport arrivals only Billie, an ‘unaccompanied child’ turns up on the connecting flight from London. No explanation from the airline and Billie goes mute on the subject.

Scully is at a loss. Where is Jennifer? Why has she jumped ship? Through choice or necessity?

To find her and get an explanation or at least closure, Scully sets off to check out their few contacts in Europe – Greece, Paris, Amsterdam – dragging Billie along with him. There are adventures and misadventures; and some hidden truths emerge. Questions are asked though mainly Scully asking himself did he really know his wife at all.

The trip around Europe, necessarily on a tight budget, is uncomfortable and hectic; and the writing brings that out in breathless style. There is also a couple of mystical episodes that have allegorical significance (and provide the title).

Does Scully track down his missing missus or find any answers? It is a page turner to the end to find out.

Chernobyl – Serhii Plokhy

The whole disaster of 26 March 1986, the build-up, the flare-up, the clean-up and the cover-up, is brought into focus in this ‘History of a Tragedy’.

It starts with the ill-planned and poorly conducted test shutdown and moves swiftly onto the desperate but futile efforts to quell the unquellable runaway reactor. That is followed by the failure to recognise or admit to the scale of the escaping radiation, with the safety of the population a mnor consideration compared with the need to maintain the fiction that the Soviet nuclear power stations are safe and protect the reputations of politicians, engineers and scientists involved. When that becomes clearly problematic, the scapegoating begins, and blame is apportioned where politically convenient. But in vain, the disaster and its effects are too big to cover up indefinitely and Plokhy is convinced it plays a big part in the eventual break up of the Soviet Union.

These components are all explored in forensic detail, and detail is the word; this is no sensationalist overview. The reader is provided with the frightening science of radioactivity and the oppressive politics of the soviet state where jobs and party position go side by side in an unhealthy mix. It inevitably involves some heavy reading, not so much the science as the politics, with unfamiliar Russian names populating unfathomable national, regional and local regimes that operate at the Party, government and industry level, all having a finger in every pie.

Plokhy does his best and brings out the broad themes effectively, and while he gives a balanced account he does not sit on the fence as to where he feels the faults lie. So, it makes for an authoritative, interesting, informative account, as digestible as such an account could be. But best not read it within fifty kilometres of a nuclear power station, unless you live there, in which case read it soon.