Nature writing meets history as a writer follows the ripples of an accident in a munitions factory
Open this book at random and you might imagine it to be another example of the new nature writing. Dillon makes generous concessions to the genre, and not just in his description of the explosive ripples caused by a darting insect known as the pond-skater in the watery woodside to which he has brought us. Who is this unexpected guide, standing there with his old three-speed bicycle and an equally archaic Rolleiflex camera in his hand?
Dillon, who is known for his writings about contemporary art, introduces himself as a Dubliner who ended up in Canterbury as a result of a short-term academic appointment. Displaced and depressed, he lived in the area for years before overcoming his “sullen indifference” to the world in which accident had dumped him. A recovering melancholic, then (and one who has surely learned much from WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn), he sets out to investigate the marshlands of north Kent. Wandering under vast skies, he finds a landscape that has the power to confirm anybody’s sense of abandonment: a series of flat vistas in which “everything was visible, or almost visible, on the surface and at the same time threatened to sink into the earth or disperse on the air”.
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