SOURCE: “Contemplating Chernobyl,” in New Statesman and Society, April 14, 1989, p. 35.

In the following review, Benn offers a positive assessment of Accident.

A first spring day in 1986 and a writer is giving herself the day off. This, a day when her beloved brother is undergoing a risky brain operation, and the consequences of Chernobyl are beginning to filter through East German television, radio, papers. The writer broods constantly on the madness of the nuclear age—on the statistics of danger of contamination as a result of Chernobyl, on an article she has read about “Faustian” young men working on Star Wars technology in California who have become so obsessed with their particular discoveries that they work 15, 16 hours a day—living off junk food and cake—isolated from women, children, “ordinary life.”

The writer is frightened by their obsessiveness and their cut-off-ness. And yet she still thinks to ask herself...