A provocative, skillfully plotted, emotionally engaging fiction—and a giant step forward for the gifted Meek.
Religious fanaticism and impassioned political radicalism are the combustible conjoined themes of the globetrotting British journalist’s third novel.
Meek, who lived in Russia and the Ukraine during the 1990s, clearly knows his way around Siberia—where most of the story’s actions occur. Its story proper begins when its antihero Samarin (whose orphaned boyhood and conflicted commitment to revolutionary principles are sketched in a prelude) is observed wandering in a Siberian forest just as a soldier and several panicked horses plunge to their deaths from a railway bridge—whereupon Samarin encounters Balashov, a former soldier in the civil war that followed the 1917 revolution, and now the leader of a cult based in the remote village of Yazyk. This hamlet is also temporary home to a Czech legion that had fought on the side of the (ruling class) Whites in that war, now stranded far from their comrades, and vulnerable to the approaching Red (revolutionary) Army. Numerous stories emerge, and complex relationships are established and endangered. Samarin, whose tales of political imprisonment and persecution are at best half-truths, stubbornly pursues his dream of a catastrophic cleansing revolution. Balashov and his followers seek purification through escape from the body’s tyranny by way of voluntary castration. The wife Balashov has abandoned, Anna Petrovna, seeks solace in her passion for photography, her attraction to the smoldering, cryptic (indeed, Dostoevskian) Samarin and the chaste attentions of Jewish Czech soldier Mutz, whose quietly conveyed decency confronts the cocaine-fuelled fury of his increasingly deranged superior officer Matula. Meek throws them all together in impressively dramatic “big” scenes whose power is ever-so-slightly vitiated by contrived explications of the paradox indicated by his superb title: the destructiveness latent in visionary all-or-nothing reversals of social order and “normal” human impulses.
A provocative, skillfully plotted, emotionally engaging fiction—and a giant step forward for the gifted Meek.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2006
ISBN: 1-84195-730-5
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
Wood spares no detail in showing us what led up to that first stroll across the great bridge—by a woman.
When the chief engineer falls ill, his wife steps up to direct the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Wood’s debut novel fictionalizes the story of Emily and Washington Roebling, the real couple who took on the immense Brooklyn Bridge construction project. Emily’s involvement was not intentional. For a respectable lady in 1870, it was frowned upon to leave the house without a chaperone, much less manage an all-male crew of foulmouthed laborers. However, Emily is determined to resist domestic constraints, especially since, due to complications attending the birth of son Johnny, the Roebling family will remain small. She intends to join the suffragist movement, but a series of tragedies besetting the bridge project interferes. Her father-in-law dies of tetanus following a work-site crash, necessitating that Wash take over as chief engineer. One of the main virtues here is Wood’s grasp of the logistics of construction without today’s heavy equipment. Underwater caissons had to be seated on the bedrock at both ends of the bridge to anchor the towers. The caisson-sinking process, involving significant pressure issues and the need to provide oxygen to men working underwater, causes many cases of “caisson disease,” i.e., the bends. Wash himself is afflicted, and during his extended recovery, Emily must act as his intermediary with a fractious group of workers, investors, and corrupt politicians. Her most trusted ally, showman P.T. Barnum, helps her develop confidence and public speaking skills but also seems intent on drawing her into a dangerous flirtation. Clad in a bloomer work costume designed and executed by Wash, whose sewing prowess far exceeds her own, Emily gradually overcomes gender prejudice and wins over her bitterest opponents, although her people-pleasing is itself gender-stereotypical. The writing meticulously evokes the sights, sounds, and smells of 1870s New York—if, at times, Wood seems to embrace the Barbara Taylor Bradford school of décor-forward description. Dialogue is inconsistent, ranging from glib to stilted.
Wood spares no detail in showing us what led up to that first stroll across the great bridge—by a woman.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4926-9813-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
An intriguing and little-known chapter of literary history is brought to life with brio.
Inspired by the true story of the role of Dr. Zhivago in the Cold War: a novel of espionage in the West, resistance in the East, and grand passions on both sides.
“We typed a hundred words a minute and never missed a syllable.…Our fingers flew across the keys. Our clacking was constant. We’d pause only to answer the phone or to take a drag of a cigarette; some of us managed to master both without missing a beat.” Prescott’s debut features three individual heroines and one collective one—the typing pool at the Agency (the then relatively new CIA), which acts as a smart, snappy Greek chorus as the action of the novel progresses, also providing delightful description and commentary on D.C. life in the 1950s. The other three are Irina, a young Russian American who is hired despite her slow typing because other tasks are planned for her; Sally, an experienced spy who is charged with training Irina and ends up falling madly in love with her; and Olga, the real-life mistress of Boris Pasternak, whose devotion to the married author sent her twice to the gulag and dwarfed everything else in her life, including her two children. Well-researched and cleverly constructed, the novel shifts back and forth between the Soviet Union and Washington, beginning with Olga’s first arrest in 1949—“When the men in the black suits came, my daughter offered them tea”—and moving through the smuggling of the Soviet-suppressed manuscript of Dr. Zhivago out of Russia all the way up to the release of the film version in 1965. Despite the passionate avowals and heroics, the love affair of Olga and Boris never quite catches fire. But the Western portions of the book—the D.C. gossip, the details of spy training, and the lesbian affair—really sing.
An intriguing and little-known chapter of literary history is brought to life with brio.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-65615-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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