The Reactor by Nick Blackburn review – the fallout of grief

From nuclear meltdowns to Bob Dylan, associations come thick and fast in a therapist’s memoir about death of his father

As a therapist, Nick Blackburn is attuned to the use of story as decoy; when what we want to talk about is too painful, or obscured from our view, misdirection and displacement edge in to fill the gaps and silences. He is aware of the danger of being seduced by those compensatory stand-in stories, of being, in the words of psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller, captured by your patient’s delusion. “Your work as a clinician,” Blackburn quotes Miller as saying, “is not to understand what he says. It’s not to participate in his delusion. Your work as a clinician is to understand the particular way, the peculiar way he makes sense of things.”

But The Reactor is not a book about Blackburn’s attempts to understand what underlies his patients’ stories, rather a fragmentary unrolling of his own particular, peculiar way of making sense of the death of his father. Here is a man whom we meet only in glimpses, the details of whose biography and identity are less significant than his absence and the manner in which he is unavailable to both his son and the reader. This is not a memoir that attempts to piece together a mass of wayward strands and details of a life in order to provide a vaguely comforting sense of the person who once inhabited it. Instead, it is a reckoning with the reality that loss can be just as cataclysmic even when its terrain and contours are indistinct and may never come into perfect focus.

That reckoning is itself variously and sometimes luridly disguised. Blackburn’s most closely tended alternative narrative is that of the explosion of the fourth reactor at the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl in 1986, a disaster that the author initially acquaints himself with via YouTube films, becoming mesmerised by visual details that seem as though they might come from a dream or a fairytale: golden corridors of corrugated yellow metal, polished marble, “the red forest and the crumbling dachas”, “catfish fattening in still waters”. But it is scientific process that really appears to compel him, and the way it can be made to function as a metaphor for the violent experience of bereavement: “Radioactive atoms want to become stable again,” he writes, “so they release energy until they get back to a balanced state.” Throughout, Blackburn ponders the half-life of grief, its power to contaminate the lives around it, its insidious unpredictability.

As anyone who has endured loss might understand, it also alters time, the reality that preceded it coming to seem both implausibly far away and crushingly, inescapably, present. There is both a becalming and a turbulence that also characterises Blackburn’s attempts to write about it: “I get anxious because in a way creative activity always has a manic quality, dancing and dancing like the red shoes, like a nuclear meltdown.”

His response to the mania of creation is to seek ever more connections: alongside Chernobyl, he takes us into the life, and death, of fashion designer Alexander McQueen; the music of Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan (“Bob says: Life isn’t about finding yourself, or finding anything, life is about creating yourself, and creating things”); the 2018 documentary about a “free love” commune, Wild Wild Country, and Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal; Derek Jarman and Billy Elliot, Sister Wendy and Ian Curtis. Thinking of Fleetwood Mac makes him think of the Manhattan project, which makes him think of the poet Thomas Wyatt, after which he reflects: “Connecting things (in hindsight) can be really exhausting sometimes, don’t you think?”

And sometimes, that feeling of exhaustion extends to the reader, who may reasonably think that another’s tenuously linked thoughts and preoccupations are not unlike other people’s dreams: fascinating to them, and possibly to their therapist, but not as utterly captivating to the outsider as they would wish. A page on which the word “Nuclear” is followed by a line break and then the word “Unclear” and nothing else is not, let us be truthful, especially illuminating.

But The Reactor does have considerable power. It movingly evokes the psychic mayhem of parental loss, that point at which, whatever one’s relationship, the idea of origins and foundations comes under scrutiny, if not outright assault. And while it confirms the isolated, individual nature of grief and can hardly be thought of as a work of consolation, it also suggests that the attempt to tell one’s story, and the attempt to listen, is not to be underrated.

• The Reactor: A Book about Grief and Repair is published by Faber (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.