QUEEN VICTORIA'S BOMB

With many obvious parallels for the present day (along with referrals to his own study, The Birth of the Bomb, 1961), this is the professed diary left by one Professor Franklin Huxtable, a rather quiet little Scottish scientist who invented an explosive so destructive that it would putatively obviate war. This was at the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign and Professor Huxtable is seen--at various intervals--when sent to first test his deterrent in India, through later considerations of its usage during this long reign. Florence Nightingale, Lincoln, Gladstone, the worldly Basil Zaharoff (""There is always an ultimate weapon. There is always another"") figure in the intermittent narrative which comes to a more decisive conclusion: namely that ""we cannot exorcise evil by creating a masterpiece of evil."" Creating a novel from an idea is also something of a parlous enterprise: Mr. Clark's Bomb, for all its good intentions, is something of a slow fuse.