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
Archer will be a great series character for fans of crime fiction. Let’s hope the cigarettes don’t kill him.
Thriller writer Baldacci (A Minute to Midnight, 2019, etc.) launches a new detective series starring World War II combat vet Aloysius Archer.
In 1949, Archer is paroled from Carderock Prison (he was innocent) and must report regularly to his parole officer, Ernestine Crabtree (she’s “damn fine-looking”). Parole terms forbid his visiting bars or loose women, which could become a problem. Trouble starts when businessman Hank Pittleman offers Archer $100 to recover a ’47 Cadillac that’s collateral for a debt owed by Lucas Tuttle, who readily agrees he owes the money. But Tuttle wants his daughter Jackie back—she’s Pittleman’s girlfriend, and she won’t return to Daddy. Archer finds the car, but it’s been torched. With no collateral to collect, he may have to return his hundred bucks. Meanwhile, Crabtree gets Archer the only job available, butchering hogs at the slaughterhouse. He’d killed plenty of men in combat, and now he needs peace. The Pittleman job doesn’t provide that peace, but at least it doesn’t involve bashing hogs’ brains in. People wind up dead and Archer becomes a suspect. So he noses around and shows that he might have the chops to be a good private investigator, a shamus. This is an era when gals have gams, guys say dang and keep extra Lucky Strikes in their hatbands, and a Lady Liberty half-dollar buys a good meal. The dialogue has a '40s noir feel: “And don’t trust nobody.…I don’t care how damn pretty they are.” There’s adult entertainment at the Cat’s Meow, cheap grub at the Checkered Past, and just enough clichés to prove that no one’s highfalutin. Readers will like Archer. He’s a talented man who enjoys detective stories, won’t keep ill-gotten gains, and respects women. All signs suggest a sequel where he hangs out a shamus shingle.
Archer will be a great series character for fans of crime fiction. Let’s hope the cigarettes don’t kill him.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-5056-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2019
Though gripping, even moving at times, the novel doesn’t do justice to the solemn history from which it is drawn.
In this follow-up to the widely read The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018), a young concentration camp survivor is sentenced to 15 years’ hard labor in a Russian gulag.
The novel begins with the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops in 1945. In the camp, 16-year-old Cecilia "Cilka" Klein—one of the Jewish prisoners introduced in Tattooist—was forced to become the mistress of two Nazi commandants. The Russians accuse her of collaborating—they also think she might be a spy—and send her to the Vorkuta Gulag in Siberia. There, another nightmarish scenario unfolds: Cilka, now 18, and the other women in her hut are routinely raped at night by criminal-class prisoners with special “privileges”; by day, the near-starving women haul coal from the local mines in frigid weather. The narrative is intercut with Cilka’s grim memories of Auschwitz as well as her happier recollections of life with her parents and sister before the war. At Vorkuta, her lot improves when she starts work as a nurse trainee at the camp hospital under the supervision of a sympathetic woman doctor who tries to protect her. Cilka also begins to feel the stirrings of romantic love for Alexandr, a fellow prisoner. Though believing she is cursed, Cilka shows great courage and fortitude throughout: Indeed, her ability to endure trauma—as well her heroism in ministering to the sick and wounded—almost defies credulity. The novel is ostensibly based on a true story, but a central element in the book—Cilka’s sexual relationship with the SS officers—has been challenged by the Auschwitz Memorial Research Center and by the real Cilka’s stepson, who says it is false. As in Tattooist, the writing itself is workmanlike at best and often overwrought.
Though gripping, even moving at times, the novel doesn’t do justice to the solemn history from which it is drawn.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-26570-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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