The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster scared the world witless. We all worried what might happen to us. But what became of those who lived there? It would be a mistake to read Irene Zabytko's The Sky Unwashed as a documentary novel, because, despite its commonplace beginning, it tells its story with characters who come to matter to us for their own sakes, not for what they can tell us about Chernobyl. Even so, Zabytko, a Ukrainian-American born in Chicago, writes from experience as well as imagination, for she has relatives and friends in Chernobyl, has spent time with them there and has taken their stories into herself.

The novel opens with a too-journalistic narrative of a Ukrainian family's dispirited life, pre-disaster, in a village where people seem to be going through the motions of life in a dying culture. Weddings are not celebrated festively so much as mockingly, less cheer than jeer. For young people, working at the nearby Chernobyl plant offers a chance to escape from ancestral poverty. Older ones, even in the gentler Gorbachev times, take a different view. They've lived through Stalin's engineered Ukraine famine; war; oppression. "The old women in babushkas who kept the old ways alive with their icons and litanies ... knew that the hard times never end," the prologue says.

The Petrenko family represents both attitudes. Old Marusia lives with her weak, dull son, whose wife, Zosia, nurses a vital spark that leads her into unhappy affairs in search of vibrant life. We don't like Zosia much at first. Irritable, nasty, she appears selfish despite having two young children. But after Chernobyl blows, her overbearing ill-temper and sharp tongue come in handy when the radiation-poisoned family encounters sneering incompetence at a Kiev hospital. Zosia bribes and browbeats her way to medical treatment for her husband; of course, we fear for those who lack such survival skills.

Yet it's the aged Marusia, with her traditional, lumbering ways, who carries the novel into our hearts. She goes along with the evacuation because there's no choice. When in the ensuing chaos she finds herself alone, though, she realizes that home is the only place to go. Arriving there after a hard journey, "She sank to her knees on the ground, and she made the sign of the cross. She uttered a prayer of thanks to be back on the land where her mother and grandmother had lived."

How Marusia survives in a deserted, radioactive village where the water tastes "like coins" is harrowing and fascinating. It's the center of the novel, much as the primacy of home and religious faith is Marusia's center. Eyes itching and red, body aching strangely, she goes to her church to ring its deafening bells every day. She tills her garden, aids a dying cat. Loneliness tries to crush her spirit. A few other residents return, bringing relief from isolation but also moral dilemmas and the pain of an old wrong that Marusia is now expected to forgive. She leads some villagers to an effective (but not very convincing) showdown with Soviet officials over basic demands. (It should be noted that this is a strong-women novel -- the men all tend to be weak, stupid or dead. Is that necessary to show that women are strong?)

The author resists any temptation to lard her story with lectures on the evils of nuclear power. A lesser writer would have introduced a character whose job was to pontificate instructively on radiation dangers and communist inefficiency (a lethal combination, for sure). Instead, Zabytko concentrates on showing what happens to her characters and how they respond, in their human particularity, to the terrors they face. Incidents affect them, and move us, without any sense of piling-on or wallowing in pathos. There are even mica-glints of humor.

Mainly we're left with astonished pride at human endurance, coupled with anguish and anger at what the novel shows so unflinchingly without preaching: that by accepting dangerous technologies, we risk irreversibly poisoning not only our bodies but also our very ground of being -- land, home, family.

It's just an ordinary day in the village of Starylis on the outskirts of the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Ukraine, where widow Marusia Petrenko awakens in her tiny house to hear her son Yurko & his wife Zosia arguing. Soon she rises to take care of her grandchildren, her garden & her prize milk cow in the shed.

Yurko labors long hours at the nuclear plant & when he does not come home for days; when the priest does not turn up for services; when the storks do not return & the air takes on a bitter metallic taste, hard to breath, hard to see - it all happens so quickly.

A profoundly moving story about forces beyond control; of having to leave all you have ever known; of being taken to strange places & surviving under the careless wing of a remote government; of witnessing death by strange diseases & an anonymity that shrivels the soul.

Until the day Marusia decides to walk home to her beloved village. Here a new story begins in the deserted farmland & houses. When other intrepid babysi wander back, life takes on a semblance of normalcy until these gentle souls begin to die.

A memorable first effort, rich in humanity & so very lyrical! Do check out my site for my full review & eInterview with this author

"The Sky Unwashed" opens with the portrayal of life in a small Ukrainian village on the outskirts of Chernobyl. There is an obvious cultural divide between the old-timers who continue to till the communal land, and the younger generation who toil at the plant. However, none of them seem to fully comprehend the ticking time bomb which looms in the distance.

The horror of the Chernobyl accident, and the mishandling of the situation by the Soviet government, are disturbing. When one of the elder women of the town finds herself alone in Kiev after a governmental evacuation, she determines that she has no real alternative other than to return to the poisoned village, where others soon join her.

I couldn't put this book down. The characters are fascinating -- especially the tenacious old women who have seen so much hardship their whole lives. Their strength shines through, as they treat the radiation poisoning as just another hurdle in their lives which must be overcome.

Coincidentally, I finished reading "The Sky Unwashed" on the day that the Ukranian government finally agreed to close down the remaining reactor... Hopefully, the rest of the harm can be repaired.