THE SINGING FOREST

A war criminal is prosecuted while a lawyer considers her own identity.

Leah Jarvis is a young lawyer with a difficult assignment: She's working on the deportation of Stefan Drozd, a man in his 90s accused of torturing and killing any number of people decades ago in the Soviet Union, then lying about his identity to gain entry to Canada. It’s clear that many, many people suffered, but Drozd’s precise role—he may have been serving in Stalin's security police or just working as a lowly clerk—has yet to be determined. Meanwhile, Leah has her own stuff going on: The three uncles who raised her seem to be deteriorating, there’s a budding romance with a colleague to attend to, and then, too, Leah starts trying to track down her long-lost father. There’s plenty to admire in McCormack’s novel, but the plot is overstuffed. With her elegant, fluid prose, McCormack leaps lithely enough from one thread to another—it’s just that not every thread is equally crucial, as becomes clear by the book’s end, when they fail to wrap up satisfyingly. McCormack’s strength is the series of moral quandaries running through the book like a set of steppingstones. “This is a case about wrongdoing, not a quality of character,” Leah thinks. Drozd, she reminds herself, “must be guilty of something precise, knowable—something he has done, not something he is, not some innate evil.” But while Leah’s concerns about the case, the quality of the evidence, the ethics of her job, are intricately explored, they aren’t quite enough to carry the whole novel. Drozd’s childhood is also described, though it’s never made clear if the descriptions are his memories or just a life that Leah has imagined for him—and there doesn’t seem to be a clear reason for keeping that distinction shrouded.

Frequently engaging but, as a whole, overdetermined.