Viva Brighton September 2015 Issue #31

literature
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Unexploded
Alison MacLeod’s frightened Brighton
Alison MacLeod’s 2013 Bookernominated
novel, Unexploded, has
been picked by the organisers of
this year’s Shoreham Wordfest as
the ‘festival read’. Unexploded spans
a year of life in Brighton during
WW2, 1940-1941, when the town
was under threat of Nazi invasion.
This very real sense of threat and
terror is at the forefront of the
novel and permeates the life of
every character.
However, as MacLeod was keen
to point out, when I meet her at The Emporium
in Brighton, this is not a book which is set solely
in the past: “When I write historically,” she says,
“I am only ever interested if I am really writing
about the contemporary”.
It is no surprise, then, that the idea for Unexploded
was conceived during the days after the 2005 London
bombings. “That’s really how the book came
about, I didn’t start off by any means thinking I
want to write a WW2 novel.” Thinking about the
way in which the fear of terrorism is felt across the
world and perpetuated by the media, MacLeod
turned to WW2, and Brighton in particular, to
explore how we are currently affected by this
persistent sense of threat.
Though London was devastated during the war,
“with Brighton it was different, it was more
psychological. Bombs were being dropped but
they weren’t constantly being dropped, at Park
Crescent there were unexploded bombs. But what
interested me was that the Nazis had a psychological
strategy for Brighton. They called it terrorism
and it was about terrorising the
population.”
MacLeod was also drawn to writing
about Brighton after having
noticed a paucity of novels set in
this city: “It is so rich, there are all
these little palimpsests of stories
here and a whole range of life,
from wealth to poverty, real light
and darker elements... I just became
alert to the possibilities and
had antennae up for Brighton and
then on the antennae a sense of
untold stories began to arrive. The way Brighton
had been affected had not really been explored.”
By setting the book in Brighton, MacLeod
succeeds in shedding light on the reality of the
situation whilst simultaneously creating a palpable
sense of surrealism. Walking around the streets of
Brighton after reading Unexploded one wonders
how this city could have ever had an internment
camp at the racecourse; how it bore this
interminable sense of invasion. But we know that
it did, and MacLeod’s use of hindsight enables the
book to avoid sentimentalism and nostalgia and
instead captures “the tissue paper of stories, shifting
about, layer upon layer... at the same time not
letting it shift so much that the tension falls out
but to keep a sense of urgency. For me very logical
realism makes too safe a container for a story and
so I wanted those touches of the surreal to shake
it… just to make it seem like it can’t be true, but it
is.” Holly Fitzgerald
Shoreham Wordfest, 20 Sept-10 Oct,
shorehamwordfest.com
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