Poisoned Words

• Indictment: Power and Politics In the Construction Industry by David Morrell
  Faber, 287 pp, £14.95, November 1987, ISBN 0 571 14985 5

The power stations and dams of the world are among the legacies of our time likely to remain for future generations of archaeologists, who will probably find the Pyramids less enigmatic than the enclosed concrete mausolea at places like Sellafield. Brunel’s statue adorns Paddington, but where and how would anyone commemorate the builders of Chernobyl? For the Kariba North Bank power station, however, there is now a memorial-David Morrell’s Indictment. Mr Morrell is the chairman of Mitchell Construction, the original contractors for the KNB project, and his book breaks ground unturned since Samuel Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers. In his pages, Mitchell Construction, in legal fiction a corporate ‘person’, comes to life like a character in a novel, persecuted and buffeted by mysteriously malign forces.