Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
You have this totally domestic scenario between two sweet old people, Jim and Hilda Bloggs, who are still caught up in the nostalgia of World War II. It exposes the ridiculousness of the government’s ideas about how to survive a nuclear war. They survive the initial attack and then die of radiation sickness. So for me this haunting graphic novel was a tender and tragic counterpart to the epic battles of Judge Dredd, and all the more memorable as a result.
Your final book is the thoroughly depressing When the Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs.
Yes, it is very sad and depressing. But it is so tender, isn’t it? You have this totally domestic scenario between two sweet old people, Jim and Hilda Bloggs, who are still caught up in the nostalgia of World War II. It exposes the ridiculousness of the government’s ideas about how to survive a nuclear war. They survive the initial attack and then die of radiation sickness.
So for me this haunting graphic novel was a tender and tragic counterpart to the epic battles of Judge Dredd, and all the more memorable as a result. Reading this during the 1980s, with the threat of nuclear war hanging over my childhood as a sort of omnipresent background hum of anxiety, I couldn't help but think of the possible fate of my own grandparents. I must have been about ten when I found it in the school library and it was quite a sobering thing to read. There are no heroics in it, none of the action-packed adventures of Judge Dredd. Instead, you see that there is no chance of survival so it made you reflect more profoundly on what a nuclear war would mean.
I remember that my parents had this Reaganish book, which they got when we lived in America for a couple of years when I was quite young, called something like How to Survive a Nuclear War, and it was an American survivalist handbook which I was quite fascinated by. It had all these techniques about how to defend your house should you be attacked. I took great comfort from this book – it made me believe that if I had clean water, tinned food, medical equipment and a rifle I could survive nuclear war. But Briggs’s book smashed that belief. We lived just outside London and I would often sit there thinking, are we just far enough away not to be vaporised when they vaporise London?
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Dr James Miller has published a number of academic articles about African-American literature, Civil Rights and the 1960s counter-culture. He lectured in American literature at King’s College London and currently teaches creative writing at London’s South Bank University. He has been fascinated by apocalyptic novels from an early age. His new book, Sunshine State, is set in a futuristic world destroyed by climate change and the resulting economic breakdown. As a child Miller believed that if he had clean water, tinned food, medical equipment and a rifle he could survive nuclear war. But Raymond Briggs’s graphic novel on nuclear war smashed that belief. ‘We lived just outside London and I would often sit there thinking, are we just far enough away not to be vaporised when they vaporise London?’
