Hiroshima by John Hersey
Hiroshima by John Hersey
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Wednesday, 06, May 2009 02:33
Published by Penguin, out May 28th, £9.99, 243 pp.
In a nutshell...
Haunting, vivid, painful, disheartening, not a feel-good book in any sense.
What is it all about?
Hersey's plainly written 31,000-word article covering the stories of six survivors of the Hiroshima bomb of August 6th 1945 was first published in 1946 taking over an entire issue of the New Yorker.
The bomb dropped at 8:15 am and the book cuts between the protagonists in the morning and as the flash of the hydrogen bomb changed their lives.
The living hell of the following hours and days are then told. The first-hand experiences of hundreds of thousands dying from the initial radiation burning out eyes and destroying the cells of survivors' bodies. Then the longer term effects, cancers and scares, physical and emotional, that fail to heal.
Hersey's original 1946 article ends as the dust settles and the first rebuilding was started, but lives are in tatters.
This new edition also includes a 1985 addition telling the lives of the following the next 40 years.
The story is of lives blighted by what happened one morning as prejudices against the survivors by the state and fellow Japanese live on, alongside a greater denial and struggle to help.
Hiroshima forms part of Penguin's Magnum series of American reportage reissues. It certainly falls in with Capote's In Cold Blood, Mailer's The Fight and Hunter S Thompson's Hell's Angels as Hersey's clear writing is as striking now as ever.
Who's it by?
John Hersey is regarded as one of the greatest American journalists of the last century.
His face has appeared on US postage stamps and there is a school named in his honour.
He wrote Hiroshima at the age of 32 and went on to pen novels covering the Warsaw ghetto and the civil rights movement.
He died in 1993.
As an example...
"He saw there were about 20 men, and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their eyes were wholly burned, their eye sockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks.
"Father Kleinsorge went back to the riverbank. There amid the dead and dying, he saw a young woman with a needle and thread mending her kimono, which had been slightly torn.
"He joshed her. 'My, but you're a dandy!' he said. She laughed."
So is it any good?
It is hard to believe Hersey wrote Hiroshima just one year after the attack. It is also hard to believe he wrote it over 60 years ago.
Hersey steers clear of over-emotionalising and preaching.
He states the six survivors' stories coldly - whether he is describing wailing masses of dying bodies, utter hopelessness or the minor detail that turn the characters from history to your own family, the man sleeping next to you on the tube, and real life.
It is a book you need to keep your distance from - as it can be too engaging.
Haunting is often misused as a term, but when you start imagining people around you on the train and in crowds with skin burning lost in the aftermath of an atomic bomb, the horror Hersey describes does not seem very far away.
The hopelessness after the event is also powerful as rumours bounce and survivors are left to die - but so too is people's drive to help others, search for family and care for the survivors while suffering themselves.
So can you convince anyone to read a book so powerful, moving and depressing? It is hardly something to curl up with in bed at night or to lie back on the beach with.
But still the message of Hiroshima and how one act of war can affect people for life needs should be heard again and again.
Hiroshima does have its limits though; the two doctors, the German priest, a mother of two, office girl and a Japanese Christian minister are all linked through their knowledge of English. And it is uncertain how their lives intermingled through the chaos by chance, or as the journalist moved from contact to contact.
There seems to be more stories to tell.
8/10
Daniel Barnes