You cannot run away from what haunts you... Midsummer, 1968. When Frank Banner and his wife Gail move to the Suffolk coast to work at a newly built nuclear power station, they are hoping to leave violence and pain behind them. Gail wants a baby but Frank is only concerned with spending time in the gleaming reactor core of the Seton One power station. Their new neighbours are also 'Atomics'--part of the power station community. But Frank takes a dislike to the boorish, predatory Maynard. And when the other man begins to pursue a young woman who works in the power station's medical centre, Frank decides to intervene. As the sun beats relentlessly upon this bleak landscape, his demons return. A vicious and merciless voice tells him he has an obligation to protect the young woman and Frank knows just how to do it. Radiation will make him stronger, radiation will turn him into a hero... The Atomics is a Gothic story of madness, revenge, and Uranium-235.
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This psychodrama had two great selling points that immediately made me keen to read it. Firstly its timeline is the late 1960s, and secondly it's set against the backdrop of a nuclear power station.
The novel opens with a mystery, that will be explained fully as the story progresses. Frank received a suspended sentence for violently protecting a girl. However, the nuclear research labs where he worked don't want him back, especially after he was maimed in revenge, his face knifed leaving a terrible scar. Friends tell his wife Gail to leave him, but she can't.
The Authority organise a transfer. It's midsummer, and Frank and Gail find themselves on the road to Suffolk where a new nuclear power station has recently been built. A bungalow in the ‘Atomics' village built for the workers awaits. It'll be their new start, and Gail is hoping for a baby. They soon meet their neighbours, Judy, Maynard and their kids. Maynard is an engineering manager at the plant: Frank takes an instant dislike to him. Gail takes an instant like to Judy and the two will become close friends as the summer goes on. When Frank discovers that Maynard is embarking on an affair with Alice, a local young woman who is a nurse at the plant, it starts to bubble up in him again. Frank must protect Alice at all costs.
We see Frank's descent into mental illness and anger, his desire to commit violence barely suppressed, his longing for danger increasing daily. Frank was damaged early after his mother's suicide, he's haunted by the person who maimed him too. This was the 1960s, and PTSD wasn't really recognised then. Gail is preoccupied with her own concerns, and spending more time with Judy. We're never quite sure whether Gail is at risk from Frank either, and that also adds to the tension. Without the nuclear setting this novel would still have been a compulsive piece of domestic noir, but the addition of the power station, Frank's unhealthy obsession with his work and the dynamics of being stuck in the sterile ‘Atomics' village all add to the sense of horror that builds up.
I also liked the chapter titles too, words mostly related to nuclear physics, such as Uranium, Reactor, Containment, Nucleus, Chain Reaction, Alpha, Beta, Gamma and so on; and they cleverly reflect the events in each chapter in a way. The Atomics is cycling journalist Maunders's first novel, I enjoyed it very much.
My fuller blog review is here https://annabookbel.net/the-atomics-by-paul-maunder
