The Great Explosion

by Brian Dillon

A masterful account of a terrible disaster in a remarkable place: shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize

In April 1916, shortly before the commencement of the Battle of the Somme, a fire started in a vast munitions works located in the Kentish marshes. The resulting series of explosions killed 108 people and injured many more.

In a brilliant piece of storytelling, Brian Dillon recreates the events of that terrible day - and, in so doing, sheds a fresh and unexpected light on the British home front in the Great War. He offers a chilling natural history of explosives and their effects on the earth, on buildings, and on human and animal bodies. And he evokes with vivid clarity one of Britain's strangest and most remarkable landscapes - where he has been a habitual explorer for many years. The Great Explosion is a profound work of narrative, exploration and inquiry from one of our most brilliant writers.

'The Great Explosion is exhilarating and moving and lyrical. It is a quiet evisceration of a landscape through the discovery of a lost history of destructiveness, a meditation on Englishness, an autobiography, a mapping of absences. I loved it.' Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes

''What a fascinating, unclassifiable, brilliant book, confirming Brian Dillon's reputation as one of our most innovative and elegant non-fictioneers. No one else could have written it.' Robert Macfarlane, author of The Old Ways

'Forensic, fascinating, endlessly interesting' Philip Hoare, Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author of Leviathan andThe Sea Inside

'A subtle, human history of the early twentieth century ... Explosions are a fruitful subject in Dillon's hands, one that enables him to reflect movingly on the instant between life and death, on the frailty of human endeavour, and on the readiness of nations to tear one another apart. The Great Explosion deftly covers a tumultuous period of history while centring on the tiniest moments - just punctuation marks in time' Financial Times

'[Dillon's] account of the Faversham explosion is as bold as it is dramatic, while his descriptive passages about the marshlands of Kent are so evocative that you can practically feel the mud sticking at your feet' Evening Standard

'A brilliant evocation of place grasped in its modernity' Guardian

'Dillon ... has a WG Sebald-like gift for interrogating the landscape ... a work of real elegiac seriousness that goes to the heart of a case of human loss and destruction in England's sinister pastures green' Ian Thomson, Irish Times

'Exhilarating ... utterly beguiling' Literary Review

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World War I

288 pages, Paperback

First published May 7, 2015

About the author

BRIAN DILLON was born in Dublin in 1969. His books include Objects in This Mirror: Essays (Sternberg Press, 2014), Sanctuary (Sternberg Press, 2011), Ruins (MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery, 2011), Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (Penguin, 2009) and In the Dark Room (Penguin 2005).

His writing appears regularly in the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Artforum and frieze. Dillon is reader in critical writing at the Royal College of Art, and UK editor of Cabinet magazine. He is working on a book about the Great Explosion at Faversham in 1916.

Reviews

[Amanda · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this up because the subject was interesting, a lesser known event during the first world war. The book, however, buries any information about this in the author's rambling memoir of his life, his anxieties about researching the book, musings on the landscape and the rubble of the former munitions facility, and at one point a long excerpt from a science fiction novel from the 1980s set in the region. Trying to pick out the actual information about the tragic event from all this chaff literally put me to sleep.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an odd book by an intellectual magpie of an author which proves ultimately unsatisfying. Indeed, the last pages dragged a bit as the author tried to be self-consciously literary when what was billed on its cover was (I thought) a straight-down-the-line history book.

Ostensibly, the book is about an appalling industrial accident in 1916 at an explosives factory near Faversham in North Kent. Around this explosion, the author weaves all sorts of material that is connected to the locality or the event - if rather tangentially at times.

We have here psychogeography, nature writing (which he is rather good at, at least at the beginning of the book), slabs of lit crit, a bit of art criticism and historical diversions into the armaments industry of the first world war, the history of explosives and other 'great explosions'.

What should have been a solid bit of popular history with one of those titles much loved by publishers if irritating to the rest of us (you know the type, Kendal's Trumpet: How the Trombone Brought Mustard to Arabia) is all over the place and a bit self-indulgent.

The history of the Faversham event (rather amateur in its methodology) is perhaps half or a little more of the whole so that one feels a little misled by the blurb. Although informative, it is interrupted with far too many diversions. It feels a bit padded out to make a paperback.

I can see why it was liked by the reviewers though - it is self-regarding and 'literary' and that is what a lot of people feel comfortable with nowadays. I did not. I like my history straight and without the excessive intrusion of the observing subject. The literary sensibility is not mine.

Still, having been irritated, taken as lots of little informative essays, there are many interesting stories here - of the massive Halifax explosion (2,000 dead and many injured) or the mining of the trenches in the first world war (one campaign blew up 10,000 German soldiers).

The art history segment on the Delft gunpowder explosion is another solid mini-essay and the Faversham explosion itself is fully reported between the digressions while the pychogeography has its moments. An acquired taste perhaps but still not an approach I enjoy.

I have to give one word of praise though. I live in Kent not too far from the area the author writes about and he does capture well the environment and the lost industrial heritage of what, until recently, has been part of the national military front line.

Outsiders often do not understand just how militarised the county of Kent was under the old British Empire. Even today, local people are more likely to be aware more than most in Britain of war and what it means, creating complicated responses which are not for this review to explore.

The book does add some understanding of how war in one part of the county dominated the lives of the local working class but the same could be said of many other parts of North and East Kent (West Kent less so but it would have got its taste of it if Hitler had invaded up the A21 or A26).

But I craved a more disciplined approach. Speaking in the first person, he feels like the outsider who does fully not understand this aspect of the case quite as well as he should - that is, just how much war was lodged in the mentality of Kent in the first half of the twentieth century.

[Robert Hepple · Rating 2 out of 5]

Published in 2015, 'The Great Explosion' purports to tell the story of a munitions factory accident in Kent in 1916 that claimed many lives. The author spends 70 or so pages describing the history of gunpowder, not withstanding the fact that the 1916 explosion happened at a factory manufacturing its more modern replacements such as gun cotton, TNT and Amatol. He spends time describing the flora and fauna of the affected region, as well as the areas that allegedly inspired Dickens for some tracts of 'Great Expectations'. My point is, whilst the story behind the accident is very interesting, the author lacks focus in a major way. I'm not saying that the areas of digression are not interesting, just that without them the book could have either a) been shorter or b) spent more pages discussing the main subject matter. Instead, you have to put up with him describing the remains of a recently dead horse which he came across whilst studying the site first hand. The lack of focus is, in my opinion, very irritating.

[Sam Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easy to read and provides an interesting insight into several explosions not just the Faversham one - if you have even a vague interest in history this is well worth a read

[Leigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brian Dillon’s The Great Explosion takes us on exploration of the north Kent marshes, through the site and history of a munitions accident that killed 108 people in 1916. In the middle of WWI, weapons manufacture was at an all-time high, and the Cotton Powder Company, together with its neighbour the Explosives Loading Company were stretched to capacity and beyond. It was perhaps inevitable that, despite the many precautions taken against such incidents, something would go wrong. Dillon looks at the history of explosives, the set-up and running of the factories at Uplees, various depictions of explosions in art and literature, the after-effects of the 1916 tragedy, and a number of industrial landscapes in the area.

I’m content to have read this book – there were some good bits – but it didn’t flow: Dillon’s detailed descriptions of mostly empty landscapes, together with his repeated need to insert himself into the narrative (either by mentioning his pointed trespassing or his unusual camera), made for a dull and halting start and finish. In the middle, Dillon rambles at times through the world of explosion-related literature and art: e.g. “Russell Hoban’s [post-apocalyptic novel] Riddley Walker is … as much in the atmosphere of cultural stasis it evokes as at the level of its hectic linguistic texture”. There follows seven pages of plot summary – excessively illustrated with quotes in the novel’s patois. Many other novels and paintings are also described in great detail (and we get two and a half pages about a dead horse). While Dillon’s extended philosophising and literary/artistic comparisons add another layer to the narrative, I found these sections tedious; not because I don’t enjoy the arts (I do), but because his digressions rarely seemed to reach much conclusion, and felt out-of-place in an otherwise-scientific approach.

Sadly, the book’s illustrations are of little use; apart from the somewhat self-indulgent pictures at the start and finish, they are too small to see much detail and all lack captions. Many pictures are described in the text (sometimes in huge detail – in at least two cases referring to coloured aspects of pictures printed in black and white), but there’s no substitute for a decent set of prints. Frustratingly, there are only two map details included (with minuscule print), and although one is reprinted in full on the cover, the area affected by the explosions is heavily obscured by the blurb!

Dillon is at his best when sticking to the facts, and his descriptions of explosive manufacture, the accident itself, and the effects of the sound and shock waves, are interesting; but overall, this book struck me as a mishmash, more an observation than an analysis, and without enough focus on any one approach to be satisfying. It’s piqued my interest on the subject of explosives, but I doubt I’ll want to read it again.

[Erica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don't be fooled into thinking this is simply a local history /First World War historical text.

It is an immaculate, well-crafted multi-disciplinary study into the 1916 munitions explosion in Kent, Dillon bases his research on a personal and direct understanding of a contemporary landscape, exposing the nature of explosions and how our understanding of them has been developed and culturally defined.

If I had to offer one area of improvement, it would be to improve the plates in the text - I ended up visiting the National Gallery to take a better look at the painting of Delft after the Explosion,

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

A summary of the explosion at the explosive factory in Kent right before the Battle of the Somme in April 1916. Over a hundred people were killed in the largest of several plant explosions that ripped across England. Somewhat dry.