The Premonitions Bureau
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Average rating2.6
On the morning of October 21, 1966, Kathleen Middleton, a music teacher in suburban London, awoke choking and gasping, convinced disaster was about to strike. An hour later, a mountain of rubble containing waste from a coal mine collapsed above the village of Aberfan, swamping buildings and killing 144 people, many of them children. Among the doctors and emergency workers who arrived on the scene was John Barker, a psychiatrist from Shelton Hospital, in Shrewsbury. At Aberfan, Barker became convinced there had been supernatural warning signs of the disaster, and decided to establish a “premonitions bureau,” in conjunction with the Evening Standard newspaper, to collect dreams and forebodings from the public, in the hope of preventing future calamities.
Middleton was one of hundreds of seemingly normal people, who would contribute their visions to Barker’s research in the years to come, some of them unnervingly accurate. As Barker’s work plunged him deeper into the occult, his reputation suffered. But in the face of professional humiliation, Barker only became more determined, ultimately realizing with terrible certainty that catastrophe had been prophesied in his own life.
In Sam Knight’s crystalline telling, this astonishing true story comes to encompass the secrets of the world. We all know premonitions are impossible—and yet they come true all the time. Our lives are full of collisions and coincidence: the question is how we perceive these implausible events and therefore make meaning in our lives. The Premonitions Bureau is an enthralling account of madness and wonder, of science and the supernatural. With an unforgettable ending, it is a mysterious journey into the most unsettling reaches of the human mind.
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You know, for a book about premonitions and foretelling disaster, this was pretty boring.
Back in 1966, there was a major industrial accident in Aberfan, Wales. Several tons of coal mining debris collapsed, slid down the mountain it was perched at the edge of, and buried a school. Several people all around the world experienced premonitions of the event, in the form of dreams of black or a choking feeling. John Baker, a psychiatrist, collected all this information, and became convinced of the idea that people can and do experience predictive moments. That future disasters could be staved off if only he could harness the power of these predictions. Thus, the Premonitions Bureau was established.
If the book had actually been about this Premonitions Bureau, maybe it would've been more coherent and interesting to me. Unfortunately I think this book suffers from a compelling idea without a lot of information behind it. NPR's review of the book says that this book was written based on an article in The New Yorker from 2019 about John Baker (can be found here), and honestly after skimming the article, there isn't much else about the Bureau that wasn't included in the article.
What can be found in the book is a lot of meticulously researched ideas and examples of premonition in human history. Lots of weird coincidental events, people dreaming of disasters, visions of something happening, that actually come true. None of them are related to one another and there's barely a mention of the Premonitions Bureau throughout, but mildly interesting on their own nonetheless.
Ultimately this was a miss for me, though. It wasn't cohesive, I couldn't really tell why I was reading each event or how it related to the book until quite a bit in, and honestly it was dry as dust throughout. I thought the most interesting part of the book was learning about the mining disaster up front, honestly.
This is an illuminating look into a quirky and previously unknown to me avenue of fairly recent British history. It tells the story of the Premonitions Bureau, an organisation that tried harness the aid of psychics in predicting disasters. It started up after the horrors of Aberfan, and ran through the rest of the sixties. largely led by two interesting and contrasting characters, who drive the narrative. It's an interesting history, but that's all it is. The book never really interrogates the idea of premonition, and isn't that interested in questions about the existence of such a force.A lot of the cases described in the book seem to me to be instances of trying to make a vision fit an event by looking at the similarities and ignoring the inconvenient differences. There's almost no argument about premonition versus coincidence, and if there was indeed any basis in fact for the Bureau's work. The author does find room for some philosophical conundrums (if a psychic predicting a disaster means that disaster is averted, does that mean the prediction was false in the first place as there was no disaster?) but I kept reading expecting some sort of analysis of the realism of the whole idea, and was left hanging. Perhaps it's outside of the book's remit, but it's not a long work, and I believe it would have been improved by some more rigorous analysis of the psychics' claims. It's a very interesting read as far as it goes, but I wish it had gone a bit further.
