Book Review – November 2022
The hollowness of the space like a migraine building behind her eyes. The landscape transformed by absence, defined by it.
The Half-Life of Snails is a novel permeated by a sense of place. Philippa Holloway examines the influence of place upon the lives of the people who inhabit two landscapes, two separate places linked by a single catastrophe that occurred several decades before, but the resonances of which linger on.
Helen is the single mum of a 5-year-old boy and works the family sheep farm close to the Wylfa nuclear power station in Ynys Môn, North Wales. As well as Wylfa, this area has another connection with the nuclear industry in that, when the reactor exploded at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine in 1986, radioactive particles released into the atmosphere were carried by the prevailing winds and fell with rain in North Wales and other parts of the western UK. Soil and ground water were contaminated and restrictions were imposed on more than 300 Welsh sheep farms. In some cases these measures remained in place until 2012. Helen was just a child at the time of Chernobyl, but it cast a very long shadow over her life.
Wylfa
The fictional company that runs Wylfa now wishes to expand its operations and is actively buying up local farmland for that purpose. Helen has no intention of selling and is one of the leaders of the local anti-nuclear campaign. She blames the proximity of Wylfa and the fall-out from Chernobyl for her mother’s terminal cancer diagnosis. She is also undergoing investigations herself for a lump in her breast, though she has not yet disclosed this concern to her family.
While she is awaiting her test results, Helen makes a long-planned visit to the Chernobyl exclusion zone. This is partly for research purposes, but also to try to lay to rest some of the ghosts of her childhood. She leaves her son, Jack, with her sister, Jennifer. Helen’s stance on the power plant is something of an embarrassment for her sister as she and her husband both work at Wylfa and live on a neighbouring smallholding. They are also concerned about Helen’s obsession with doomsday prepping and the effects this seems to be having on Jack. Helen’s plans for her return journey from Ukraine are disrupted when she becomes inadvertently caught up in the Euromaidan protests. Jennifer has to cope with her own anxieties as well as those of Jack while they await news from Helen.
The Half-Life of Snails achieves a powerful evocation of both the north coast of Ynys Môn, where Wylfa is situated, and the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. Holloway conducted extensive field research in Ukraine while she was planning this book and her descriptions of ‘the zone’ have a palpable intensity. This is a landscape defined by absence. But the empty villages and farmsteads are, nonetheless, peopled by the echoes, the ghosts of those who once lived there. It is, in a very real sense, a haunted place.
The methodology that I used for researching the book was psychogeography, so that’s going to a particular place and examining really closely how those places, how those landscapes or structures affect people’s feelings and behaviours.
At one level The Half-Life of Snails highlights humanity’s differences: geographical differences, political differences, generational differences, gender differences. Even within the same family Helen and Jennifer are, ostensibly, very different. But a closer reading reveals our similarities and hints at something deeper which unites us all. Even Helen and Jennifer have more in common than they are, perhaps, prepared to admit.
Current events in Ukraine give Holloway’s book an added poignancy and relevance. We are reminded that things that happen elsewhere, even 2,000 miles away, can still have an impact on all our lives. Events, be it a nuclear explosion, a war or a more personal trauma can, and do, echo down the years.
Philippa Holloway
Philippa Holloway is a writer and academic. She has won prizes in literary awards including the Fish Publishing Prize and the Writers & Artists Working Class Writer’s Prize. She is co-editor of the collection 100 Words of Solitude: Global Voices in Lockdown, and a senior lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at Staffordshire University.
