Darragh McKeon Interview: The Final Meltdown

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an author in possession of a new novel will at some point be asked where he or she gets their ideas, as if the concept of an imagination was unknown to the questioner.

Luckily for Darragh McKeon his debut novel, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, doesn’t lend itself to this clichéd question, set as it is in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. A more apt question is: why does a writer from Tullamore wish to tell this story in the first place?
“When I was about 12 or 13,” Darragh explains, “some children came over with Adi Roche’s Chernobyl Children International. I remember being really intrigued by their lives, even the idea that they lived in tower blocks. Tullamore is a pretty flat place. I couldn’t get my head around the accident – or these very foreign people and their lives.
“Then, when I was about 17, I saw a documentary Adi Roche made called Black Wind, White Land: they went to the reactor and interviewed farmers who had come back to their homes in the exclusion zone to highly irradiated, toxic land. And yet there they were. My dad is a farmer and that connection is something the Irish understand. That really struck me, and when I got into my mid-20s I started reading about it. I became compelled.”
All That Is Solid Melts Into Air tells the story of the nuclear disaster from multiple perspectives, including those of Grigory, a surgeon sent to deal with the casualties; his ex-wife Maria, a former dissident journalist; her nephew Yevgeny, a troubled musical prodigy; and Artyom, a young Ukrainian boy living in the transit gulags set up for refugees. We see the effect of the disaster on their lives: one of the most distressing aspects of the novel is the official and personal response, which is by turns lax and brutal.
“What makes Chernobyl different is that it didn’t feel significant at the time: it was an explosion in the countryside. When 9/11 happened I think everybody knew it would change the course of history. With Chernobyl, the people in the town next to it had no idea what the effect would be. When firemen arrived, they didn’t have radioactive protective gear – and this a city built to serve a nuclear plant. Radioactivity is silent — you can’t see it or touch it or smell it. In some ways it was a very undramatic accident.
“One thing I found interesting,” he adds, “was about the control room of the reactor itself. There was a manual that outlined what you should do in case of a meltdown and all of these were blacked out. I think that says something about Soviet culture — that even the conception that something like that could happen would be a criticism of the system. There is a long cultural history that leads to that point.”
All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is not an easy read: the cruelty of the soldiers to ordinary people caught up in the disaster during the evacuation of Pripyat recalls the excesses of the SS. Just as disturbing is the way those affected by the fallout were seen as either spreading poison wherever they went, or as having received more than their fair share of limited resources.
“In the months after the accident there was quite good medical treatment and State support in the initial stages and that caused a certain disequilibrium between people who were, let’s say, resident in Kiev, who weren’t receiving any State support but who had a tough life: they see these resettlers, who are seemingly unaffected – because it takes a long time for radioactivity to affect you – coming in and getting a new home and State support. That caused tension.”
While writing the novel, the Fukushima nuclear accident happened. After years of reading and writing about Chernobyl, how does he generally feel about nuclear power?
“I went to Chernobyl with Adi Roche last November and we stood outside the reactor. In the months after the accident the Soviet authorities built what they called a sarcophagus — a huge concrete containment unit. Tens of thousands of people died building it. They expected it to last a 100 years and it lasted about 25 and now it is leaking and falling down.
“When you stand outside the reactor and you see this old leaky cowshed – it’s a breeze block structure – you realise that we are not prepared to deal with nuclear power. Fukushima shows. Plus the Irish Sea is one of the most nuclear-contaminated stretches of water in the world. Sellafield is in shut down now, but nuclear plants regularly vent radioactive matter into the atmosphere.
“We just don’t have the ability to deal with this power.”

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is published by Jonathan Cape