Remaking the World

There persists, in the Anglophone world, a rumbling appetite for the type of "Russian" novel that largely fell into disuse among Russians themselves many decades ago. Such a novel should include a complicated and, probably, far-fetched plot narrated in a realistic manner; a vast gallery of characters and an equally vast historical and geographical backdrop; extremes of human behavior and experience; anarchy, semi-delirious philosophizing and exceptional religious fervor. "The People's Act of Love" offers all these ingredients and a great deal more -- too much, perhaps. What is certain is that it amply satisfies at least one source of our craving: the need for an exhilarating story told with skill and invention.

James Meek, a foreign correspondent in the former Soviet Union throughout the 1990s, has set his novel at the other end of the communist era, at the height of the Civil War, in Siberia, 1919. The destitution and disorientation of the time are aptly conveyed. As one character says, this "is a different kind of war. One where you can't understand who is on which side." Stranded amid the confusion is a company of Czech soldiers who have been together for five years. They left Prague in 1914 to fight for the Austrians against the Russians. Captured by the enemy, they joined the Czechoslovak Legion in Kiev and re-entered combat on the Russian side. Now, caught up in the Civil War, they are holding out against the Bolsheviks and are desperate to return home. During this last conflict, the legion had taken over "the whole of the Trans-Siberian, and for a while the only free Czechoslovakia was six thousand miles long and two meters wide." The company on which the novel focuses, however, has been reduced to a less impressive dominion: the little town of Yazyk, some 100 miles north of the great railway, near the Yenisei River. The currency of Yazyk is written out in Czech, Russian and Latin, and bears an image of Tomas Masaryk, Czechoslovakia's first president; the town's sadistic leader, Captain Matula, snorts cocaine and instills terror in what is left of his troops.

As Meek reminds his readers in an afterword, the peregrinations of the Czechoslovak Legion, formed from prisoners of war and deserters, are a matter of (little-known) historical fact. Yazyk, on the other hand, appears to be the author's own creation, the means by which his colorful narrative threads are tied together. It is to this town that a beautiful wife follows a husband who has joined a sect of skoptsy, or voluntary castrates; in Yazyk that the young intellectual Samarin is promptly locked up by the Czechs after claiming to have just fled incarceration in the Far North; and in Yazyk that an Evenk shaman, favored by Captain Matula, is looking for a horse to take him to the Upper World. The plot hinges on the fates of two of these characters: the castrate Balashov, once a hussar and now considered the holiest of the "angels" in the shadowy community of the local skoptsy; and the enigmatic Samarin, whose arrival coincides with murders and talk of a cannibal preying in the vicinity. These rumors are stoked by Samarin's own gruesome account of his flight from Russia's northernmost prison camp. He owed his escape, he tells the court of Yazyk, to a senior convict who fattened him up before taking him as sustenance for the long journey across the tundra. One name given to such victims in gulag slang was korova, or cow. The convict, Samarin says, is still on the prowl.

The historical precedents for the narrative are one reason why it holds our attention: Meek applies his research discreetly and to convincing effect. Another is the fluency and confidence of the prose. Meek writes in energetic, simply structured sentences, and his plotting is intricate and clever. But his ambitions go well beyond the telling of a good story or the illumination of extreme cultural practices. Yazyk is the meeting-place not only of lives, but of languages, beliefs and philosophies. Over everything hangs the central Idea of the era: revolution and the reforming of man. These ambitious themes are linked in the novel through lurid examples of attempted self-reformation and self-overcoming, from the apparent virtue of the castrate's sacrifice, as he rids himself of "the keys of Hell," to the possibility that an act of cannibalism might itself be a sacrifice to serve the greater good. It spoils none of Meek's surprises to reveal that his characters' efforts meet with failure. Indeed, Meek suggests as much with the epigraph he takes from the writer Andrei Platonov: "Busy remaking the world, man forgot to remake himself." The novel seems very deliberately constructed to bear out this thesis, even at the expense of the free development of its characters.

Canongate Meek, who covered the former Soviet Union as a reporter for the Guardian in the 1990s, sets his novel in Siberia during the Russian Civil War.

It remains open to question, however, whether Platonov's insights benefit from being borne out again, at such length and in such a manner, by a contemporary British writer. Platonov wrote as a witness to the Revolution and as an active participant in the attempted remaking of the world; and he wrote at great cost to himself. His fiction, which is among the most extraordinary in Russian literature, is available in the impressive series of translations published over recent years by Harvill. If we genuinely wish to explore and understand the epigraph quoted above, we would do better to read Platonov than Meek. I say this not to denigrate Meek's literary gift, but to raise the complex issue of what cultural purpose, beyond storytelling, a book such as his serves -- a question which kept returning to my mind given the quite overwhelming eulogies to "The People's Act of Love" from Philip Pullman, the historian Antony Beevor and other cultural luminaries. In Beevor's opinion, quoted on the back cover, "Such a truly Russian novel, with its huge horizons, is an exceptional event in English literature." But this book is not "truly Russian," and if it were, it would belong to Russian literature. The confusion is partly Meek's doing. He appears to strive, at times absurdly, for some phantom standard of cultural and literary authenticity, of true Russianness. His characters use unexplained Russian words in their dialogue, while his own English sometimes sounds like an overliteral translation from the Russian (the use of the word "idiotism," for example, instead of idiocy).

It would seem, to judge from the reactions to "The People's Act of Love," that we need the semblance of a "truly Russian" novel as much as, if not more than, the thing itself. But Meek's cultural ventriloquism is a different genre entirely from direct translation, and comes with its own limitations. Anything is possible here, but little is at stake. Russia offers a fictional territory where all taboos may be explored while being held at a distance, among other people, their acts and loves; a heart of darkness from which we can eventually beat a safe retreat -- unstained, furthermore, by the sense of implication that plagues the narrator of Joseph Conrad's novella. After the tale is told the reader can fall back, as Meek's Lieutenant Mutz hopes to do, "inside the borders of a sensible nation, or an empire ... and slam the door on anarchy like this." There must, one feels, be more direct and moving ways of carrying out the kind of moral and psychological inquiry that interests James Meek.

Oliver Ready's translation of "The Prussian Bride," by Yuri Buida, has been shortlisted for the inaugural Rossica Translation Prize.