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Red Alert

Credit...Alex Nabaum

The nucleus of “All That Is Solid Melts Into Air,” Darragh McKeon’s whirling first novel, is the Chernobyl nuclear accident, a catastrophe that embodies the political, economic and moral bankruptcy of the waning Soviet Union. McKeon makes it the center of a much larger, interconnected story, as the great Soviet writer Vasily Grossman did with the Battle of Stalingrad in “Life and Fate.”

Artyom, a boy in a village not far from Chernobyl, wakes to find the sky replaced with crimson. “It looks as if the earth’s crust has been turned inside out, as if molten lava hangs weightless over the land.” Enough time in 20th-century Eastern Europe has inured his father to the unbelievable, and he is less easily impressed: “It’s the same sky we’ve always lived under. It’s just in a different mood.”

Meanwhile, firefighters who have never heard of radioactivity arrive to Chernobyl in shirt sleeves. They begin to vomit, but without “panicked crowds to confirm their private fears” they push misgivings aside. A technician finds the power plant’s first-aid room barren because to prepare for such a colossal disaster would be to suggest that it could occur, and to make such a suggestion is politically unthinkable.

The flight from the towns and countryside surrounding Chernobyl is the most harrowing description of displacement I’ve read since the Dunkirk evacuation in Ian McEwan’s “Atonement.” Pages of the strange, surreal and horrific pass with the authenticity of raw news footage. Only one box of iodine pills is available for a city of 60,000, and so the elderly pass around contaminated milk, believing it will fortify them against radiation. The military responds to the humanitarian crisis by sending in fighter jets and robots designed for Mars exploration. Dogs are shot in front of their owners by soldiers who see themselves as war heroes. A woman fills a jar with dirt from her parents’ grave, only to be told the earth beneath her feet has been polluted.

A book billed as an “end-of-empire novel” might easily lose both reader and character in the high-altitude, low-­oxygen air of abstraction, especially when the empire in question is the largest state in recent history. After all, how to portray the final era of an empire spanning 11 time zones if not broadly? But it’s moments like these that make “All That Is Solid Melts Into Air” such a startling achievement. Even as McKeon cuts a wide swath, his scenes, characters and story lines build as the gradual accumulation of the particular.

In one such episode, Artyom’s father tries to bring an unhinged door onto a bus crowded with evacuees. The soldiers are initially as nonplused as the reader, until they see a series of numbers carved into the wood and realize the door records the various heights of his children. The door has also held the bodies of his parents at their wakes. He shows the soldiers “the notches, the names, the tribal markings denoting the history of the thing, the only object he has ever cared for, a slab of grooved timber on which his own dead body will rest, until, midsentence, one of the soldiers steps up and stuns the butt of his gun into the man’s nose.”

It’s a small moment, but one indicative of McKeon’s narrative stance as a whole. By investing objects and settings with a history of individual triumphs and disappointments, he wrings surprising emotional depth from the mundane. And by proving that stories too intimate to ever make their way into the history books are nonetheless worth telling, the novel makes a powerful argument that no one is unremarkable.

Grigory, a surgeon whose story later dovetails with Artyom’s, leaves the relative sanity of his Moscow-area hospital to assist in the evacuation. There he becomes a splinter of decency lodged within the cruel and incompetent government response. At the operations center, the K.G.B. has blocked outbound calls, fearing the public relations disaster more than the environmental one. Grigory breaks into a nearby apartment and calls individual families at random from a phone book to warn of the dispersing radiation cloud. There’s up to 150 names on each page of the phone book, and he reaches only 60 before he’s cut off. Small acts of defiance, however futile, provide these characters a sense of identity separate from the political system they serve, even if it’s only the awareness that decency will be their downfall.

Post-Chernobyl, the narrative shifts between a resettlement camp (“what a city would look like if you took away all the walls and furniture”) and Moscow, where Grigory’s estranged wife, Maria, atones for personal and political transgressions. She is perhaps the most complicated of the many characters populating these pages. Both her journalism career and her marriage end when her editor links her to subversive samizdat, and later coerces her into an affair under the threat of ruining Grigory. When we first encounter Maria, she’s been relegated to a factory floor where she soon risks the future of her nephew, a piano prodigy, in a misguided act of resistance. It forces both her and us to re-evaluate our understanding of ethical choice when principles and pragmatism diverge.

Maria’s story highlights one of the few shortcomings of this richly envisioned and thoroughly researched novel. All the central characters are victimized by the state, but they are rarely complicit in its crimes. Who isn’t going to sympathize wholeheartedly with a surgeon saving those the government has discarded? Or a bullied 9-year-old whose shorts fall off during a gym class rope climb? But the corrupted conscience of a state can replicate itself within the conscience of even the most well-intentioned individual. Greater attention paid to the corrosive politics of the private sphere, where the government’s betrayals are carried out by friends, neighbors and family, might have complicated the question at the heart of the novel: How should we act when personal and societal moralities conflict?

This seems particularly noticeable in the second half of the novel, when the momentum McKeon has carefully built divides and dissipates among multiple subplots. But it’s hard to find fault in a novel so fearless. If McKeon’s imaginative reach at times exceeds his structural grasp, this feels less like the avoidable missteps of a rookie than the inevitable fissures of a seasoned novelist pushing against the boundaries of his form.

A coda set in 2011 shows that while the lives of these characters may have transformed, the new Russian state looks much like its predecessor. What began with a meltdown ends with music, and in a surprising turn, we come to understand that time is a solvent that can convert even failure into states of grace. McKeon’s characters may already have receded into history, but by imprinting their triumphs and tragedies onto the imagination with such visceral empathy, he has given them a deserving afterlife in this powerful novel.

ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR

By Darragh McKeon

452 pp. Harper Perennial. Paper, $14.99.

Anthony Marra is the author of “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 20 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Red Alert. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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