Pros: Chilling in its brutal and suspenseful narrative, and in its stultifying environment. Unputdownable.
Cons: Narrative becomes contrived by the end, but by then, who cares?
The Bottom Line: Fiction so real in its texture and historic setting that it gives new meaning to the term horror: brutality, fear, and a society built on lies and deceit.
Ultimately the tremendous critical success of British writer Tom Rob Smith's first novel, "Child 44," is due as much its vivid atmospherics as to its thrilling plot, strong narrative, and compelling hero. I picked it up at an airport expecting to be reading pulp fiction; what I got was a "gulp" in my throat as I descended into a good man's hell, and felt a nation's pain.
Smith has turned a stunning tour-de-force: basing his mystery on real serial killer Andrei Chikatilo -- the so-called "Butcher of Rostov" who murdered his victims in the Soviet Union in the 1980s -- and transporting him back to the Orwellian final days of Stalinism. The effect of this retro-setting is to double the horror of mutliple gruesome child murders by bootstrapping them with the gruesome, soulless Big Brother society of 1953 Russia. Smith accomplishes this via a period realism that is so vivid and spot-on that it takes on appropriate surrealistic tones. I was reminded of the film "Chinatown" with its ever-present leitmotif of deniability. And I was as transfixed by Smith's portrayal of the society as I was by the breakneck suspenseful narrative.
IN A NUTSHELL: "Child 44" is centered on a Soviet Security Officer, Leo Demidov, and his wife Raisa. Leo is a war hero, a believer in Stalin's "Worker's Paradise," and an uncomplaining executor of evil deeds against his own countrymen to help sustain the status quo...spying, lying, torture, murder, fabricating evidence. Not exactly the everyday pulp novel hero you come to feel for.
All things considered, he and Raisa have got it pretty good until two simultaneous circumstances conspire to light a conscience he had never acknowledged...as a good policeman he is convinced a dead child is a murder victim despite the State's insistence otherwise, and as a husband he realizes the wife he loves so much is under suspicion of treason.
Suddenly, Leo is in a quandary. Every sinew in his body tells him the child was murdered. This is a problem because in Stalin's Worker's Paradise there can be no murder, hence there are no murderers, period, end of story. People die, yes, but certainly not as a result of cold-blooded, premeditated homicide. And though he suspects his wife is actually up to something, he isn't sure and refuses to set her up to save his skin and his career as his superiors advise him to do.
Leo can't help himself. He picks and he probes where he is told he should not. Then, suddenly he has to deal with back-stabbing by a devious and envious fellow officer who wants nothing better than to bury Leo's career, punish his wife and parents, and step over him in the pecking order.
Ultimately, Leo and Raisa are banished to the remotest of outposts -- a new industrialized city in the nation's frozen tundra of a wasteland. It is during this ordeal that Leo stumbles onto clues that lead him to believe that the murder of the child was actually one in a string of serial killings, a theory that is pure anathema to the State. And when he finds a suspect, his dilemma is magnified. How does a man on the run who authorities now want dead -- and whose wife is persona non grata -- prove that a suspect is a killer in a society that refuses to acknowledge that such things occur?
IN SUM: Real horror is best exposed by nuance rather than graphic descriptions. The imagination -- when expertly set as it is here by Smith -- does a better job than literal exposition, in my view. Though the violence of the incidents of murder is blunt, it is never gratuitous. In fact, its bluntness is more shocking than if it were drawn out, underscoring the reality that for all the pretense, individual life in Stalinist Russia had no value.
Add to that Smith's frightening portrayal of fear and deceit as a social rudder in a barren land full of hungry, desperate people, and you have a truly horrifying environment. Consider this passage about a woman dying of starvation who owns a cat she cannot bring herself to kill and eat, while her fellow townspeople are starving:
"Maria waited until nightfall before opening her front door. She reckoned that by the cover of darkness her cat stood a better chance of reaching the woods unseen. If anyone in the village caught sight of it they’d hunt it. Even this close to her own death, the thought of her cat being killed upset her. She comforted herself with the knowledge that surprise was on its side. In a community where grown men chewed clods of earth in the hope of finding ants or insect eggs, where children picked through horse sh*t in the hope of finding undigested husks of grain and women fought over the ownership of bones, Maria was sure no one believed that a cat could still be alive."
It is this cat that a hungry young boy sees and chases, only to be found later, dead alongside some railroad tracks...the first child victim that Leo later insists was murdered by a serial killer of children.
If Smith's narrative becomes a little contrived by the end, it doesn't matter by the time that happens. We are sucked early enough into a maelstrom of fear, disgust, horror and self-loathing that we cannot but hope against hope that the light of Leo's conscience can somehow survive, much less triumph.
"Child 44" is an exciting and thought-provoking read far beyond the scope of most murder mysteries of its ilk. It deserves every one of the many accolades it has received.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Tom Rob Smith was born in 1979 to a Swedish mother and English father, both antique dealers, and brought up in South London, where he now lives. He started writing plays at school and continued at St John's, Cambridge. After graduating from Cambridge University in 2001, he completed his studies in Italy, studying creative writing for a year. He then worked as a scriptwriter including time working for Channel 5's now defunct soap Family Affairs.
Child 44, his first novel, was published in 2008 and has been translated into 17 languages to date. It was awarded the 2008 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for best Thriller of the year by the Crime Writer's Association. In was also long listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize and the 2008 Costa First Novel Award. Ridley Scott owns the film rights.
In Stalin s Soviet Union, it s a crime against the State to suggest that a murderer--much less a serial killer--is on the loose. Exiled from his home,...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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