The Half-Life of Snails by Philippa Holloway
Review by Cath Barton
‘Wylfa glows, floodlit on the horizon. She can hear it humming.’
Events which change the lives of individuals and communities across the world, sometimes catastrophically, are as likely to be the result of human error as malicious intent. So it was with the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor in 1986, when Helen, one of the principal characters in Philippa Holloway’s debut novel The Half-Life of Snails, was a little girl. That event, and its consequences for the life of her family and others close to them in Anglesey, has haunted Helen ever since. As she campaigns in opposition to plans for the Nuclear Power Station Wylfa B, the commissioning of which will threaten the family farm, her focus is on personal resilience, for both herself and her nearly six-year-old son, Jack; she is conscious that another mistake could happen at any time in the nuclear power industry.
Facing a health scare, Helen visits Chernobyl in an attempt to put her demons to rest, aware that it may be her last chance to so do. She also sees the time apart from Jack as preparing him for the possibility he might lose her: ‘The time apart is like an inoculation, for both of them. It might hurt, but it will make them stronger in the long run.’
The trip – on her carefully maintained Triumph Bonneville – takes Helen into a country that is dangerous in more ways than one, and on the return journey an accident causes her to stay for two weeks in a remote place in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, unable to contact home. Meanwhile her sister Jennifer, who works at Wylfa and is looking after Jack while Helen is away, faces a trauma of her own when she breaks a rule at work.
The possibility of radioactive contamination is an omnipresent threat throughout, at least in the characters’ minds. On the Chernobyl tour the guide shouts to Helen not to step on the moss, because it concentrates the radiation. Her precautions about food and drink are abandoned, later, when she has to take risks in order to survive. Back home, mother’s cancer has returned, which Helen has always blamed on caesium carried west on the wind after the Chernobyl disaster. Then there is this: looking through her sister’s belongings, Jennifer sees on her unprotected computer the pictures that Helen has uploaded to the Cloud, amongst them one of metre-and-a-half long catfish in the Chernobyl cooling ponds. It makes her ask her husband Ioan about the reports of very large fish in the warm waters near the outlet from Wylfa. It is a particularly chilling parallel.
In The Half-Life of Snails Holloway skilfully navigates the complexities of life in territory which is unfamiliar, whether physically or emotionally. As a prepper for possible future calamities, Helen’s default position is to be cautious, but when she sees the protective sarcophagus at Chernobyl from closer than she had thought would be possible, she feels unexpectedly hopeful and is tempted to respond to a sexual invitation from a man on her tour. She does not approve of such recklessness and pulls back, but later it is through that very impulse that she saves another man’s life.
Helen’s son Jack presents a tough front to the world and does not easily relate to other children. He keeps two snails in a large pickle jar; these are his friends. However, when Jennifer and Ioan bring a lamb that has lost its mother into the house in an attempt to save it, he is scathing; he thinks they should eat the animal. Like the other characters in the novel, he is painted in vivid colours, and for all that he is so young, what he does at the end of the book is plausible, given the way Helen has trained him and his clear devotion to her.
The war over territory in Ukraine in 2014 which is part of the danger faced by Helen on her journey is, sadly, once again active, and much more extensively than before. The Half-Life of Snails does not illuminate that specific conflict, nor indeed does it seek to do so. What is does do is throw light on what Holloway calls ‘the weight of personal history’, the feeling that ties people to the place they have come from and makes them fight for it, be that Helen in Anglesey or Anton, the man whose life she saves, in Ukraine.
The Half-Life of Snails is that wonderful thing, a novel that can be read in several different ways. On the surface it is a gripping thriller, ripe for transfer to the big screen. But it also excels as an exploration of the geography of the human heart, which Holloway shows to be as difficult to navigate as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, for which there is no detailed and reliable map available.
The Half-Life of Snails is published by Parthian, 3rd May 2022