A plot to blow up St Paul’s Cathedral is seen through the lens of family tragedy in James Meek’s latest novel. The demolition man Raf, a gifted young engineer, has been granted access to the cathedral for his PhD project on traffic vibration, but secretly packs the cavities with Semtex. The narrative begins with Raf in Belmarsh prison, refusing to speak, while the story focuses on the Burman family, whose lives he has upended.
Raf was a student of Mr Burman, a middle-aged English teacher who now fears he may have inadvertently radicalised the young man with his Marxist chatter. Burman is still grieving his charismatic wife Ada, while his adult daughter Leila seethes with resentment. Meek reroutes the terrorist plot into the fraught domestic spaces of the Burman home, making it feel hazardous and broken.
Meek, a former Guardian Moscow bureau chief known for historical fiction like The People’s Act of Love, here explores the interplay of past and present, conservation and demolition. The narrative shifts between Mr Burman, Leila, and Raf, weighing obligation against freedom. St Paul’s becomes a proxy for the absent Ada, and the novel observes how loss reshapes the landscape of family life.
Though the premise suggests a thriller, the story unfolds as a psychogeographic experiment, with the cathedral serving as a metaphor for marriage. The plotting is precise, but the metaphor becomes rather too explicit near the end. Still, Meek’s elegant prose and insurrectionist energy make this a compelling domestic drama with a cathedral-sized shadow.
