The Report by Jessica Francis Kane (review)

177 Book Notes The Report, by Jessica Francis Kane Graywolf Press, 2010 reviewed by Jennifer Wisner Kelly On a clear night in March 1943, 173 men, women, and children from the downtrodden London neighborhood of Bethnal Green suffocated in a packed crowd while entering a public air-raid shelter in a Tube station. It was the worst civilian disaster of World War II and the outraged local citizenry demanded an explanation . What exactly had happened? Why did tragedy strike? Could it have been avoided? Ultimately, they demanded that someone bear the mantle of culpability. The Home Secretary appointed a well-respected local magistrate, Laurence Dunne, to investigate and write a report about the disaster. In her debut novel, The Report, Jessica Francis Kane fictionalizes this monumental event and its aftermath, giving the tragedy human faces and voices while posing moral questions about the nature of official investigations and the communal need for blame. Kane deftly captures the complexity of the Bethnal Green incident through Magistrate Dunne’s quest for truth. The witnesses who sat at his amiable tea table in the Town Hall told Dunne conflicting accounts, colored by their own fears and biases . There were explosive sounds. There weren’t. The stairwell was dark. Or wasn’t. The crowd was unruly. Or, it wasn’t. There were too many Jewish refugees. Or not. Dunne untangled most of these facts with objective evidence: coroners’ findings, an examination of the scene, and witnesses’ corroborating testimony. While the “what happened” was mostly decipherable, the more important issue of “why it happened”—the blame—proved elusive. Who should be blamed when so many people’s actions were contributing causes of the crush, but none, in isolation, would have been sufficient? For instance: a supervisor installed an overly bright lightbulb at the shelter’s entrance, knowing full well that panicky people would likely smash it; a war-weary policeman arrived seven minutes late for work; the Home Guard tested a loud civilian-defense weapon without warning; and, most critically, a frustrated mother, in a moment of racist malice spurred by exhaustion, annoyance, and fear, shoved a Jewish refugee woman who then fell to her knees and, thus, started the blockade. The people of Bethnal Green wanted an enemy—be it colorado review 178 German pilots or fictional weapons of mass destruction or even their own classist, incompetent government—but the enemy, it turned out, was even closer at hand. The primary responsibility for the crush lay at the feet of the Bethnal Green residents themselves. As Dunne explained thirty years later: “The people needed a report, not a judgment. I didn’t want to deliver a scapegoat.” Kane anchors her narrative in 1972, when Dunne finds himself on the other side of the table as an interviewee of a young documentary filmmaker. This two-track timeline broadens the novel’s scope, allowing for a portrait of Dunne both during the war and three decades later. Thus, Kane captures not only Dunne’s moral dilemma during the time he wrote the report, but also his own reflections on whether his choices of what to include and what to exclude were sound. While Dunne is The Report’s quiet protagonist, he shares the stage with a half-dozen or so other citizens of Bethnal Green for whom the incident stirred the most guilt. For these secondary characters, Kane provides sketches of both their family life and their versions of the incident and its aftermath. To achieve a sense of communal experience, Kane also puts on stage a hefty cast of unnamed characters through snippets of their testimony before Mr. Dunne. This three-tiered approach—the full central story of Laurence Dunne, the guilt-ridden few of Bethnal Green in shorter sketch, and the voices of the rest of the population in clips of dialogue—creates an effective kaleidoscope of voices and experiences. The exhilarating events of the crush itself fill barely the first thirty pages of the novel, leaving the bulk of the narrative to wrestle with the tragedy’s aftermath. Through Dunne’s investigation , Kane explores claims of racism against Jewish immigrants , classism between the residents of the East End of London and those of...