BARSA KELMES

A pre-modern steppe lord is reborn as a contemporary clone in Bekakhmetov’s debut novel.

In Almaty, Kazakhstan, in 2021, aging molecular biologist Ansar Tolengitovic laments how much his country has changed in the past few decades: “The young men particularly weren’t as masculine and brutal anymore…not even like he and his friends had been in Soviet times,” he notes. “Forget resembling their glorious nomad ancestors, who could boast of being able to conquer any city, country, or empire.” Ansar gets it into his head that the only way to return his nation to its glorious nomadic past is to clone Kenesary, the last khan of the Kazakh people, using DNA from the khan’s long-dead body. He finds a willing surrogate mother in Tomyris, a multilevel marketing hustler and sometime harpist. Raised on a secret biological preserve on the island of Barsa-Kelmes, the new Kenesary is sent to an elite school in Britain, so that he may rub shoulders with future world leaders and captains of industry. At a Uyghur restaurant in Berkshire, he meets a tightrope walker named Amursana who considers himself to be a reincarnation of the last prince of Jungars. The two men seem destined to reinstate the ancient ways of steppe life—at least until the powers that be get wise to their plan and vow to halt the revolution. Bekakhmetov’s prose is barbed and often funny, as when the two revivified steppe lords meet with the queen of England: “Kenesary and Amursana were happily enjoying their new titles in Berkshire. Having royal prefixes added to their long and unpronounceable names made the gentlemen feel more comfortable. Declaring in all seriousness that they were princes felt outrageously uplifting.” The author is adept at crafting larger-than-life characters and introducing them economically. There are some issues with the novel’s momentum, however, in part because the reader never really gets a clear idea where the story is headed. Even so, the novel succeeds as a satire of modern concerns about masculinity, Soviet nostalgia, and even cryptocurrency, among other contemporary issues.

A madcap satire that skewers notions of returning to an imaginary past.