LONGER REVIEW: REQUIEM FOR THE UNDER GROUND

Two women, separated by countries and decades, try to make sense of their realities in Sinclair’s debut thriller.

In Romania, in the year 1989, 13-year-old Roxana Lupei wishes she came from a loving, wealthy family, like her friend Elena does. Instead, Roxana’s mother disappeared a decade earlier without saying goodbye, leaving Roxana alone with her alcoholic father. One morning, Roxana wakes up to find her father, too, is missing, though she doesn’t dare go to the state police. “You know where they’ll take me if I have no mama, no papa,” she tells Elena. “They say it’s worse than death.”  The state police show up anyway, looking for her father, leaving Roxana no choice but to stage a daring (and violent) escape. In her haste to get away, however, she accidentally knocks Elena off a cliffside to her death. Meanwhile, in 2019 London, middle-aged stepmother-of-two Izabella Stern undergoes therapy, trying to recover her lost memories—essentially, everything that had happened to her before she turned 16. As far as she can remember, her life began when she woke from a coma at a Moscow hospital, two days after her 16th birthday. Her doctor presses her to recall something earlier, but Izabella can’t be sure the memory is real: “An image. Grass, long wavy grass, yellowy green, fronds billowing in the air, first one way, then the other, in formation like a flock of birds.” Izabella has to keep her treatment a secret from her handlers—since she also happens to be an undercover assassin for a shadowy Russian organization. As Roxana makes her way across a Romania slipping into chaos—its dictator, Ceausescu, is poised for a fall— Izabella probes her memories from before the time of her coma. It’s clear the women’s stories have something to do with one another, despite the separation of decades, but what is it? And how can Izabella’s past help to change Roxana’s future?

Sinclair’s prose is taut and fluent, establishing the mood and texture of a scene with a few evocative details. Here, Roxana, who grew up near a dam, meets a man who claims to have been sent by her mother, while a helicopter flies overhead: “Chuff, chuff, chuff, chuff, chuff, chuff. A staccato strumming reverberated through the air, reminding her of the dam’s turbines as they opened the sluice gates, and for the first time the man turned and faced her, eyes strafing the sky.” The book is long at nearly 500 pages, but the story moves quickly. The narrative’s initial stinginess with explanations soon begins to recede, drawing the reader deeper into the intricacies of Roxana’s (and, eventually, Izabella’s) predicaments. Neither character is terribly well-defined, at least in terms of personality: Each feels constructed primarily to move from one problem to the next. Even so, the pacing is quick enough, and the twists are unexpected. This is the sort of serpentine adventure to read in just a few sittings; it might not leave a lasting impression, but the ride is enjoyable.

A propulsive thriller with a compellingly escapist plot.