The Explosion (1978)

I'm not sure if I'm alone on this, but I always tend to associate (mildly but consciously) the book I'm reading with where I obtained it. While second-hand bookstores are chock-full of tomes, intriguingly from God-knows-where, even brand new books can have a story behind them which will often linger in my mind as I read them. I could probably tell you where each of the novels on my bookshelf have come from (many from the other side of the globe), but Hans Heinrich Ziemann's The Explosion stumps me.

The Explosion has been stuffed away amongst my books for an eternity, its unabashed '70s paperback artwork nestled inconspicuously among novels with far less yellowed pages. While collecting a selection of books to bring with me to Sydney, I stumbled across this forgotten possession and, intrigued, placed it in the box I was packing.

A translation of a German novel, The Explosion is clearly inspired by the disaster film fad that swept through Hollywood during the 1970s. All the clichés are in place. There's a tortured hero in the form of Martin Born, the director of a nuclear power station that's controversially set to open near the West German town of Grenzheim. There's a love interest in Anne Weiss, whose passion for the environment is nearly matched by her new-found (though implausible) love for Born. And there's a misguided but ultimately insane villain, whose plot to create awareness of the fragility of the nuclear station ends up causing an unprecedented catastrophe.

Unfortunately, The Explosion also contains those annoying clichés that often ruin disaster stories. For instance, Weiss spends the bulk of the story attempting to save a busload of schoolchildren, encountering a number of far-fetched obstacles along the way (culminating in a gun-toting, power-crazed mayor). And while the novel doesn't end on an entirely happy note (indeed, it does briefly explore the issue of collateral damage, so brilliantly covered in Watchmen), The Explosion ends with an exciting but far-fetched solution to impending disaster.

The Explosion is essentially a real-time novel, akin to the 24-hour format of Dan Brown's novels. And like Brown's books, The Explosion is told via a series of short, punchy chapters, reminiscent of scenes from a movie. Ziemann's well-researched thriller spends its first half examining the pros and cons for nuclear power, while the second part dissects the gruesome effects a nuclear explosion would have upon society. The Explosion's setting of Cold War Germany adds an extra dimension to the novel once the disaster strikes and Ziemann explores its political repercussions.

There are some pacing issues; while the first half builds a suitable amount of tension over the disaster promised on the book's cover, the disaster itself seems curiously underdeveloped. There's also the strange decision to shift the focus away from the characters developed in The Explosion's first half during its second. It almost feels like a 500-page novel stripped down to under 300 pages (most of which feels lost from the second half), or, perhaps more accurately, the novelisation of an unmade film.

Truth be told, The Explosion was probably an artefact I picked up from a used bookstore while on holiday somewhere. Ultimately, it's a solid if unremarkable page-turner that may well have been what that occasion demanded.