#40: Agent 6

Agent 6, by Tom Rob Smith (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2012)


Summary:
"Leo Demidov is no longer a member of Moscow's secret police. But when his wife, Raisa, and daughters Zoya and Elena are invited on a 'Peace Tour' to NewYork City, he is immediately suspicious. 


"Forbidden to travel with his family and trapped on the other side of the world, Leo watches helplessly as events in New York unfold and those closest to his heart are pulled into a web of political conspiracy and betrayal -- one that will end in tragedy.


"In the horrible aftermath, Leo demands only one thing: to investigate the killer who destroyed his family. His request is summarily denied. Crippled by grief and haunted by the need to find out exactly what happened on that night in New York, Leo takes matters into his own hands. It is a quest that will span decades, and take Leo around the world -- from Moscow, to the mountains of Soviet-controlled Afghanistan, to the backstreets of New York -- in pursuit of the one man who knows the truth: Agent 6."

Opening Line:
"The safest way to write a diary was to imagine Stalin reading every word."

My Take:
Not bad, but certainly the weakest in the trilogy that includes Child 44 and The Secret Speech. The first two books were solidly entertaining political thrillers; this one alternates between dragging a bit and jumping abruptly across way too much time and space for the reader to have a good grasp of what's going on. It's not clear if Smith's trying to write a thriller about the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan or a psychological novel about a secret policeman who starts having doubts about the rightness of all he's done, and it doesn't quite fit either niche correctly.

#32: City of Thieves

City of Thieves, by David Benioff (New York: Penguin Group, 2008)

Summary:
"Stumped by a magazine assignment to write about his own uneventful life, a man visits his retired grandparents in Florida to document their experience during the infamous siege of Leningrad. Reluctantly, his grandfather commences a story that will take him almost a week to tell: an odyssey of two young men determined to survive, against desperate odds, a mission in which cold, hunger, and the Russian authorities prove as dangerous as the invading Wehrmacht.

"Two young men meeting for the first time in a jail cell await summary execution for crimes of dubious legitimacy. At seventeen, Lev Beniov considers himself 'built for deprivation.' Small, smart, insecure about his virginity, he's terrified about the sentence that awaits him and his cellmate, the charismatic and grandiose Kolya, a handsome young soldier charged with desertion. However, instead of a bullet in the back of the head, the pair is given an outrageous assignment: In a besieged city cut off from all supplies, secure a dozen eggs for a powerful colonel to use in his daughter's wedding cake. Lev and Kolya embark on a hunt to find the impossible in five days' time, a quest that propels the from the lawless streets of Leningrad to the devastated countryside behind German lines. As they encounter murderous city dwellers, guerrilla partisans, and finally the German army itself, an unlikely bond forms between this earnest teenager and his unpredictable companion, a lothario whose maddening, and endearing, bravura will either advance their cause or get them killed.

"Hailed for his brilliantly drawn characters and incisive ability to capture the pulse of urban life, David Benioff rises to new heights in this portrait of two unforgettable young men and Soviet Russia under siege. By turns insightful and funny, thrilling and terrifying, City of Thieves takes us on a breathtaking journey into the twentieth century's darkest hour even as it celebrates the power of friendship to transform a life."

Opening Line:
"My grandfather, the knife fighter, killed two Germans before he was eighteen."

My Take:
Don't think there are many authors out there who can successfully combine a buddy movie and the seige of Leningrad between two covers, but somehow, Benioff manages. City of Thieves is an engrossing, entertaining book that manages to capture some of the humor and absurdity of war without trivializing it.

The main story opens in the Crosses, as Lev, an achingly young seventeen-year-old whose mom and sister fled the city long ago, awaits an unknown but dire fate in the dark, forebidding prison that's long been the stuff of every Leningrad child's nightmares. Enter Kolya, a handsome-and-knows-it Cossack deserter who claims he can write in the pitch dark and quotes from a great Russian novel that Lev (son of a famed poet) has never heard of. Kolya is arrogant but kind, Lev is impressed but annoyed, and whether or not they admit it, both are terrified. Not usually the stuff of lifelong friendships ... that is, until the next day, when the local colonel offers to redeem their lives if they can bring back a dozen eggs for his daughter's wedding cake within a week's time. Yes, in a city whose very name still defines the word siege.

Since both young men value their lives, they have no choice but to try. Their search begins in Leningrad proper, where they assume someone, somewhere must have eggs, and they need only the money, barter, and/or guile to get them. They crash with an old friend-with-benefits of Kolya's, narrowly escape a tribe of cannibals who do indeed have food to sell, and learn the truth behind the rumors of a crazy but armed old man who still keeps a flock of chickens on a rooftop somewhere ... but alas, no luck, and no eggs. They make a daring escape from the city, thinking the Germans must have left a farm or 2 intact somewhere, if only for their own provisions. Their instincts are correct, though it's not only the soldiers' culinary appetites the lovely young residents are satisfying -- a fact which incenses Kolya until his hosts describe, in harrowing detail, what the alternative would be and exactly how they know. Together, the young men and their hosts hatch a plan to catch the Germans with their pants down ... which is interrupted by the arrival of a band of pro-Allied guerrillas who have had some success plaguing both the German soldiers and the not-so-popular-around-here Soviet army. The guerrillas are led by Vika, a crack sniper barely Lev's age who seems to have a secret up his sleeve (among other places).

As you might expect, the young ex-cons join forces with the partisans, additional hair-raising adventures ensue, and not everyone survives till the last chapter ... though you know all along that Lev will, as he's still alive and now a grandfather in the frame story. A bit formulaic, I suppose, if I'm being honest -- but captivating and (har, har) novel enough that I didn't mind. Recommended if you enjoy World War II stories and/or tales of young men's adventures.

#72 - The Secret Speech

Today, I finished The Secret Speech, by Tom Rob Smith (Grand Central Publishing, 2009). This book is a sequel to Child 44, which I read earlier this year, and it does indeed meet my first sequel test: it stands perfectly well on its own, TYVM, whether or not you've read the earlier one.

The story is set about 4 years after Child 44 ends, though like its predecessor, it opens with a 1949 prologue that sets the stage for the action to come (though here, the relationship between this prologue and the main story is much clearer from the get-go). Lazar, a pragmatic priest who's more or less cooperated with the Stalinist regime, is standing in the crowd, waiting to watch the destruction of his Moscow church. When the demolition is botched, he rushes to save the handful of documents and icons that remain hidden in the building, aided by his wife Anisya and young seminarian Maxim. Alas, he is caught by the authorities -- and shocked to learn that his protege, Maxim, is none other than secret police officer Leo Demidyev. Both Lazar and Anisya are hauled off, presumably to the gulag, as the curtain falls.

Fast forward seven years. After his success tracking down the serial killer in Child 44, Leo's now working in the legitimate (if not well-publicized) homicide division of the Moscow police department. This entails none of the secret arrests and coerced confessions of his old job, and in the intervening years, he and his wife Raisa have, belatedly and tentatively, built an honest, even loving relationship. However, at 14, Zoya, the elder of the two daughters they adopted at the end of Child 44, still hasn't forgiven Leo for his role in her parents' murder. As the story begins, Leo receives a middle-of-the-night phone call from a distraught former colleague. Thinking him merely drunk, Leo advises the man to go back to sleep, and promises they'll talk in the morning.

And then all hell breaks loose. Rising party leader Krushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin's purges and cult of personality has just been made public, with tremendous consequences. Leo's panicked colleague, terrified that his wife and children will learn of his role in Stalin's brutalities, murders them in their sleep before killing himself. Zoya is inspired to stand up in school and denounce Stalin herself; not surprisingly, she and Raisa (a teacher) are soon looking for a new school. She then offers Raisa a startling ultimatum: if Raisa wants Zoya to live with her and behave as her daughter, she must leave Leo. (Did I mention that, in all the confusion, Leo puts two and two together and realizes that someone in the doorway the night of the phonecall + a mysterious knife on his floor = Zoya plotting to kill him in his sleep?)

However, before Zoya can make good on her threat, she is kidnapped. The culprit, not surprisingly, is a specter from Leo's past: Anisya, now d/b/a Fraera and leading a cell of an increasingly powerful underground gang, the vory. Fraera has an ultimatum of her own for Leo: either he must free Lazar from the gulag where he's spent the last seven years, or Zoya will be executed. While restrictions have loosened in the wake of Krushchev's speech, there are still limits ... and in order to save Zoya, Leo must pose as a prisoner himself, and come face to face with the fate to which he consigned so many others. Moreover, even when he completes his mission, he learns that Fraera has only begun to extract her revenge.

The Secret Speech takes us from Moscow to the wasteland of the Gulags to the doomed Budapest uprising of 1956, and has many of the same strengths and weaknesses as did Child 44. Great literature this isn't; none of the characters are especially well-developed, and (yes, I know this is a frequent complaint of mine with novels of a certain style) many of the scenes have a slightly-implausible, Hollywood action movie feel to them. Nonetheless, it is exciting (mostly; the pacing was a little off in places), and it raises some intriguing questions about how cruelty affects the perpetrators, and what's left when a brutal, repressive system is suddenly discredited. If you like spy novels and/or James Bond-style action, you'll probably enjoy this one.

#49 - Gorky Park

On Friday night, while Mrhazel and Littlehazel were engrossed in original Star Trek reruns, I finished Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park (Ballantine, 1981). This one's been on my list since I read Child 44 a few months ago; eventually, I'll go back to The Gulag Archipelago and complete the Soviet-era political thriller troika.

The verdict? A decent read, engaging enough, but definitely a period piece. Set (mostly) in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, it tells the story of Arkady Renko, a Moscow homicide investigator of average ambition and less-than-average Party loyalty who (we suspect) achieved his position only by dint of his father, a famous Stalinist-era general. The novel opens with the case that will change Arkady's life forever: the discovery of three frozen bodies, fingertips removed and faces mutilated to thwart identification, in Moscow's Gorky Park. He and his old nemesis, Major Pribluda of the KGB, respond at the same time, but after tromping around contaminating the crime scene, the KGB washes its hands of the case. Their lack of interest remains even when Arkady discovers one of the victims is an American. Given his history with Pribluda, something about this doesn't sit well with Arkady, and to distract himself from the collapse of his marriage, he immerses himself in an ill-advised investigation to find out who the Gorky Park victims are and who killed them.

For a suspense novel, I found the book a bit slow-paced. Smith's descriptions of Moscow are rich and vivid, and definitely succeeded in giving the reader a sense of place. Unfortunately, his descriptions of his characters are less so (yeah, I know I complain about this with almost every suspense novel I read ... you think I'd learn), and with so many of them to keep track of, this made the story line a bit confusing in places. Suffice it to say that there are elements of international intrigue and plain old ordinary greed at play here, and Arkady ultimately becomes unable to trust anyone. This would be more compelling if we'd gotten to know him well enough to be moved by his plight, but for me, this didn't happen.

All in all, Gorky Park is worth reading if you stumble across a copy and want something you don't need to think too much about (though maybe if I had, the characters and plot twists would have made a bit more sense) -- but not really something that, in our post-Cold War era, seems to have aged very well.

Book 32, Child 44

What an interesting premise for a book. I finished Child 44, Tom Rob Smith's debut novel, last night, and only just now learned that it's loosely based on the true criminal exploits of Andrei Chikatilo in the Stalinist-era USSR. Perhaps that's proof that truth can indeed be stranger than fiction.

At any rate, Child 44 is part murder mystery, part spy thriller, and if you'll pardon the pun, the combination makes for quite a novel read. After a brief but harrowing opening vignette in the famine-ravaged Ukraine of the 1930s, in which two brothers go into the woods on a desparate hunt for meat, but only one returns, the story jumps forward to 1950s Moscow. Here, we meet our protagonist, Leo Demidov, a war hero-cum-secret police officer who appears to be at the top of his game. Possible methamphetamine addiction aside, Leo's unwavering Party loyalty and ruthlessness have served him well; he's risen rapidly through the MGB ranks; has a beautiful wife, Raisa; and has been rewarded with a comfortable apartment of his own and cushy jobs for his aging parents. Moreover, Leo is not just a good politician or an expert spy; he's a true believer in the aims of the State, and in whatever brutal means are necessary to achieve them. When a fellow officer insists that his young son Arkady was murdered, this makes Leo an excellent choice to set the grieving family straight: Arkady's death was a tragic accident, to be sure, but as Stalin's USSR is a worker's paradise, crime -- even murder -- simply doesn't exist.

The limits of Leo's loyalty are tested when, after butting heads with long-time rival Vasili during the capture and torture of a "spy" who turns out to be just an ordinary veterinarian, he finds Raisa's name inserted into a coerced confession. Despite his suspicions, he refuses to save his parents and himself by denouncing her. Given the many interrogations and punishments he himself has administered on the State's behalf, he's not surprised by the 4 a.m. arrest that follows, but he is deeply stricken to learn that Raisa never loved him in the first place, and married him only for the sake of fear and survival. The pair are shipped off to a meager apartment in a remote Ural outpost, where Leo is assigned to a low-level militia job under the command of General Nesterov. Here, he gets involved in investigating the killing of a teenaged prostitute. While the locals are content to pin the blame on a mentally disabled man, Leo recognizes the graphic details as being identical to those reported in Arkady's murder. With Nesterov's grudging support, he sets out to find a pattern and stop the killer ... never mind that no crime records are kept, so there's not much to go on, and if he's discovered, he and his parents will be sent to the gulag or worse.

According to one review, Smith initially envisioned Child 44 as a movie, and it has the feel of one. In many places, he effectively conveys a mood with just a few pointed details. There's one particular escape-and-chase scene I could almost picture watching on the big screen as I read it, and the opening description of a region so beseiged by famine that people boil their shoes and eat bark to stave off starvation is positively haunting.. The only colorful or bright thing about the story is its stark red and white covers; in between, the reader really feels the grey, suffocating nature of the omnipresent Stalinist regime.

Unfortunately, the characters were also a bit monochromatic; by the end of the novel, we've learned a fair amount about Raisa's past and motivations, but little about any of the other principals'. In Leo's case, this may be deliberate -- he believes so completely in the rightness of the State that he really has subsumed his own individual memories -- but it's not clear how he got that way or why the story's events precipitate a change. It's also been suggested that Vasili's intense loathing of Leo needs further explaining, though I'm not sure I agree. As I see it, both Leo and Vasili are just trying to survive, politically and personally -- a situation that's made enemies in far less cut-throat professions than this one.

I do, however, think the ending seems to wrap things up a bit too tidily, given the grim nature of most of the story. The professional side of the resolution was amusing (yes, I'm deliberately being vague so as not to spoil it), but the rest just felt a little too happily-ever-after to ring true. Nonetheless, I found the book up until these last few chapters exciting and intriguing -- enough that I've added Gorky Park and The Gulag Archipelago to my "must read" list, in keeping with the theme. If you enjoy a good spy novel with a decent amount of meat to it, I'd recommend this one.

Next up: Political intrigue enters the 21st century, with Our Lady of Greenwich Village, and then it's on to Marriage, A History ... which is bound to raise some eyebrows during a visit with the in-laws!