SWAN SONG

by T.J. Binyon ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 13, 1984

Vanya Morozov, 35-ish professor of English literature at a Moscow university, is the narrator of this atmospheric but ragged thriller--which gets off to a crisp start: Vanya is picked up by KGB types, put in a cell, and handed a puzzling dossier labeled ""White Swan."" What's going on? Well, as Vanya soon learns, his old chum Alik, now a rising KGB official, is in charge of investigating the recent upsurge of religious, sectarian cults--including the one code-named ""White Swan."" Furthermore, it seems that their friend Lyuba (long-ago mistress to both men) is involved in this religious fanaticism. So Alik; alternately cozy and threatening, wants Vanya to track Lyuba down and use their old relationship as a way of extracting information about the cult. And, reluctantly, Vanya agrees--while recalling the past, sleeping with the fourth member of the old foursome (filmmaker Tanya), and musing heavily on his overall dissastisfaction with a detached academic life. (""What I needed was self-redemption."") He traces the genuinely born-again Lyuba to a resort-town, gets beaten up by cultists, has an interview with the bonkers cult leader Father Zakhar, a ""Savonarola of the steppes"" who's planning to become the ayatollah of a bizarre quasi-Christian rampage on the USSR. Eventually, then, while assorted sneaky types seem to be following Vanya around, he journeys to Vologda, headquarters of White Swan activities--where the situation soon reveals itself to be more complicated. Is KGB-man Alik himself part of the simmering cultism? Or is he monitoring the White Swan fanaticism as some sort of controlled experiment? Or. . ."" In any case, Vanya decides that he must singlehandedly prevent the White Swan movement from exploding into bloody violence. And this quest makes him an occasional prisoner, an assassination target, the would-be thief of the White Swan icon, and (finally) a co-conspirator with UK and US agents. Neither Vanya's inner wrestlings nor his Buchan-esque exploits ring especially true here. But Binyon, who teaches Russian at Oxford, has laced this farfetched adventure with convincing USSR backgrounds and mini-lectures on Russian thee-political history--providing an educational, if only spottily suspenseful, pastiche.

Pub Date: July 13, 1984

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dial/Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1984

Categories: FICTION