James Mcconnachie

In the heart of darkness, the atom bomb

The connections that Patrick Marnham makes in Snake Dance - from the Congo to Fukushima, from Conrad to the Bomb - are sometimes tenuous but always compelling

Scientists working on the top secret Manhattan Project, manually haul out a container of radioactive material in New Mexico. Photo: Time & Life / Getty

At the dark heart of this dark book is a startling fact: Joseph Conrad was employed to steam up the Congo river by the same company, Union Minière du Haut Katanga, that later shipped uranium from the Congo to the US, where it was used to make the bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Patrick Marnham develops that historical oddity into a brilliant travelogue, blended with an angry history of America’s atomic bomb and a meditation on what the creation of nuclear weapons means for the human psyche. It is his own journey into a Heart of Darkness.

He follows not a river, however, but the flow of uranium. He visits the original Congolese mine at Shinkolobwe (‘the fruit that scalds’), tours the badlands of New Mexico where the bomb was developed and ends in the ironically named ‘Control Zone’ surrounding Fukushima, Japan, which is the nearest landscape he can find to one devastated by a nuclear explosion.

The travel writing is first-class. In Belgium’s monstrously huge Palais de Justice, Marnham describes the colony of blind cats that exists in the subterranean darkness of the legal archives. In the decaying sheds of Kinshasa’s National Museum, he sees ‘wooden figures so beautiful that you wanted to reach out and honour them, beside fetishes, twisted, clotted and black, which you would rather not see at all.’

In the control room of Kinshasa’s decrepit nuclear reactor, he notices that ‘a transparent, plastic ice-cream container has been placed over the button’ that would fire up the reactor. ‘Kinshasa is not so much the capital of a sovereign state’, he comments, with lugubrious savagery, ‘as the abandoned control panel of a long-dead empire.’

Marnham’s thrillingly ominous account of New Mexico introduces a key topic, the destruction of Native American society, and a surprising key character, the classical art historian Aby Warburg.

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