In ‘Atomic Anna,’ the Nuclear Disaster in Chernobyl Launches a Time-Traveling Adventure

ATOMIC ANNA
By Rachel Barenbaum

Timing is every thing, or so they say. In the case of Rachel Barenbaum’s new novel, “Atomic Anna” — which starts on April 26, 1986, with Chernobyl’s Reactor No. 4 ripping apart, “releasing the most perilous substances recognized to man” — timing is rather virtually anything: The blast sends Anna Berkova, the chief engineer at the notorious nuclear facility, on an accidental leap by time.

Anna wakes on a snow-protected mountaintop with her head splitting in suffering and her hands “burned and uncooked.” She heads for shelter, wherever she encounters a stranger lying in a puddle of blood, claiming to be her daughter, Manya. Manya tells Anna that it is now Dec. 8, 1992, introducing cryptically that they’ve failed. “You have to check out all over again,” she states. “For Raisa. You promised to help you save Raisa.”

“Who is Raisa?” Anna asks.

“Your granddaughter,” Manya tells her.

With that, Anna is sucked back again through time, returning to the times just soon after the nuclear explosion, with “radioactive ash coating the garden, the streets and cars and trucks, and worst of all, the men and women.” But her excursion to the potential has specified Anna two vital items: a photograph that Manya has slipped her, which functions as a reminder that Anna’s voyage by time was actual, and a new purpose to “put the entire world back the way it should be.” Initially, this means likely again in time to prevent the explosion at the nuclear plant, but, as she weaves back again and forth throughout decades, Anna commences to recognize that just about every decision has an impact, some of which reverberate through generations. She also learns some crucial principles of time journey: She can go again to any specified time only 2 times, she can stay for only two hrs and she just can’t ever arrive way too close to her earlier self.

One particular of the many wonderful things about “Atomic Anna,” a book about Chernobyl, certainly, but also about comic guides, the electricity of math, finding one’s reality, and adore, the two biological and observed, is the main group of girls who ground it. We shift from Anna to her daughter, Manya — renamed Molly in The usa — who has developed up in Philadelphia with adoptive dad and mom, refuseniks whom Anna helped to escape Russia. Then there’s Raisa, Molly’s daughter, who rivals her biological grandmother in terms of mathematical genius and spirit. We peer into their lives and trajectories as Anna moves by way of time, trying to determine out how to established issues right and how to express her requirements to her beloved kinds, even as things inevitably change when she touches the previous. The novel is masterfully plotted — a single has to consider an monumental whiteboard was included as the writer charted out what any provided transfer might set in movement, every single result with its have stack of linked dominoes.

Provided Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine, the takeover of Chernobyl and the devastation that has happened since, Barenbaum’s timing seems almost prophetic. Of training course, “Atomic Anna” is about considerably extra than time travel, or even war, nudging us to consider how we might improve the harmful courses we seem to be bent on, no matter whether as persons or nations. What would it truly get to take care of issues for fantastic?

Timing may be all the things, but, of system, time is not infinite. We have only so lots of hrs to reconcile our pasts, to mend our inherent brokenness, to move into the potential. As Barenbaum reminds us, if we really do not admit our truths and modify the training course we’re on, soon enough, it will simply be as well late. Time will be up.