"The secret speech" by Tom Rob Smith

This is the second of the Leo Demidov trilogy about a former MGB officer in Moscow as Stalin's regime gives way to Khruschev. The title refers to the 'secret' speech given by Khruschev at which he denounced the state security systems for their brutal repressions under Stalin. At the start of the novel these are being distributed to former agents who either then kill themselves from remorse or from fear of what their neighbours will say or who are killed. This is a promising beginning: it offers the opportunity for menace to stalk the city in an atmosphere of moral ambiguity. Leo is, after all, the head of the Homicide Division and unbelievably good at his job, diagnosing that an apparent murder was a concealed suicide within a few minutes of seeing the body. Alas, any pretence at a whodunnit is swiftly abandoned as the Homicide Division is dissolved and the killer reveals herself by kidnapping Leo's adopted daughter in revenge for wrongs done to her by Leo in the past. The story turns into a thriller. Leo must travel to the Hungarian uprising via a prison ship and a Gulag in order to retrieve his daughter who has undergone a Patty Hearst style conversion and fallen for a young pickpocket.

This book has clearly been written with the intention of turning it into an action thriller film. Unfortunately it would be the sort of film that millions watch and I hate. A great deal of action is packed in: the story moves on relentlessly. Tank shells explode all around Leo and his family. Lesser characters are killed off with minimal grieving. Few scenes last longer than a few pages; some moments of potentially high drama last no more than a paragraph.

The characters are mostly shallow and unbelievable. The relationship between the boy who grew up as a pickpocket and became a thriller and the rebellious teenage girl is ludicrous. The transformation of the meek wife of a priest into a hardened manipulative criminal gang leader is justified by suggesting that she became embittered in the gulags. I just don't believe any of it.

Thrill-a-minute action with minimal depth. March 2014, 449 pages

"Child 44" by Tom Rob Smith

This thriller has sold over 1.5 million copies and has been shortlisted for or won over 20 awards. It was even longlisted for the 2008 Booker Prize. The cover proudly proclaims that it is NPR's (I understand that this is the National Public Radio network of the US) top 100 thrillers of all time.

Why?

The book starts with young Pavel and his younger brother Andrei hunting a cat in a Ukrainian forest to try to keep themselves from starving.

Twenty years later Leo is a war hero and an officer in Stalin's feared MGB. His job is to 'investigate' denunciations which really means to arrest suspects, arrange torture to extract confessions and arrange for their imprisonment or execution. The system must be perfect which means that once a man is denounced he must be guilty. This is the perfect system for Leo's jealous underling, Vasily, to win promotion by denouncing his boss's wife. Demoted and sent away from Moscow, Leo and his wife start to investigate a series of child murders.

Thus this book is set in the paranoid last days of the Stalin regime (and the Beria regime after his death and the early days of the Khruschev regime after Kruschev's coup) and there is a lot of backbiting and betrayal but somehow I never felt the atmosphere of the novel recreated the sense of paranoia and suspicion and mistrust and general darkness that there must have been. 'Nobody can be trusted' is therefore more useful as a plot device that an ethos. Equally, Leo and his wife fall out because his job entails arresting, torturing and executing mostly innocent people but you don't get the feeling that this is a major flaw in his own character.

The plot is standard. It is not a whodunnit in any sense of the word: there are no clever deductions by the detective: he works out, long after the reader, that the killer of many children in different towns often near railway tracks must be a man who has access to travel. All he then has to do is to work our which two factories regularly exchange people and scan their personnel files. He's still late. We have been introduced to the killer half way through the book. The odd peculiarities of the killer's MO are never properly explained and even the final twist I anticipated long before it came.

I also hated the writing. The author uses the word 'would've' with distressing frequency, not in a dialogue nor even as characterised PoV narration but in the standard author voice.

This is a standard thriller; nothing special. I wish I hadn't bought the whole trilogy!

March 2014; 470 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Berlin" by Antony Beevor

This book recounts the final months of the Nazi regime. It starts in January 1945 when the Soviet forces invade Eastern Prussia and cross the Vistula to liberate the rest of Poland. It finishes when Berlin is captured and the Germans surrender.

It is compelling reading. Although I found it very difficult to keep track of which army was attacking where and who was defending against whom (and the maps at the front are frankly inadequate) one cannot miss the broad sweep of the narrative. Using individual and eye-witness accounts, Beevor touches the human horror of war and then multiplies it into an utterly shocking yet believable narrative. This we go from individual accounts of gang rape into the realisation that a staggering 100,000 German women are estimated to have been exposed to these awful experiences. He describes the confusion of troops attacking through forests and he emphasises the futility of sending scarcely pubescent boys into battle. There are scenes of hell as mis-thrown grenades blow a feet off and moments of utter weariness as shell-shocked and exhausted soldiers stumble through mud, falling in front of and being crushed by tanks. There are scarcely credible accounts of women queuing for water: when a shell kills some the others just close ranks a little closer to the front of the queue. There are also moments of pathos: the eighteen year old broadcaster announcing that the Fuhrer is dead in the last broadcast before the aerial is destroyed and others who tried to continue with normal life as bombs exploded around them.

Why did the Nazis fight on? They were massively outnumbered by an a]enemy whose equipment and supplies were better in every way. Often they had insufficient ammunition. They threw into the battle inexperienced and unfit soldiers, often armed with antiquated and useless weapons. They must have known that they were going to lose. At then end they were fighting from building to building and they were dying for no purpose. Why did they not surrender sooner?

Beevor believes that the Battle for Berlin reveals "the incompetence, the frenzied refusal to accept reality and the inhumanity of the Nazi regime." It is difficult to insert a cigarette paper between the inhumanity of Hitler and that of Stalin but these inhumanities often went right down the line to each general who attacked when he knew he would lose many, many men. What doomed the Nazis was probably their incompetence. It seems difficult to brand a regime that ran Germany so successfully for five peaceful years as incompetent but it is difficult to understand how any system that deliberately set up duplicate bureaucracies so that they could compete with one another can possibly be competent. The leadership fought one another at every opportunity, even while hiding in a bunker.

The Nazis were massively inefficient in almost every way. They were especially wasteful of human talent. But they never had anything like the resource potential of the USSR. Invading Soviet Russia and declaring war on the USA were mistakes born of monstrous vanity. And Beevor suggests that the tragedy of fighting to the bitter end had its genesis in Hitler's  own vanity. He had no future after the war and he refused to consider the possibility that other people might be better off without him. He delayed his suicide until Berlin was destroyed and Germany devastated.

The Nazi leadership would have been laughable if they had not been so wicked and if they had not caused so much suffering to so many people.

One of the refreshing things about Beevor's book is how he is able to step aside from the faux objectivity of the scholarly historian and condemn wickedness and stupidity when it occurs. He highlights the moral deficiencies of the Nazi regime and many of those who followed them, even if they claimed to be ordinary soldiers or civilians following orders. "The Third Reich, in its death throes, revealed its frenzied rage against both common sense and common humanity."

This is a terrible tale in many ways. At the same time it makes gripping reading. Beevor's narrative, though confusing at times, has moments of genius. In the end it reassures. The Third Reich could not have survived because hatred is doomed to destroy itself. To build you need cooperation, you need to share, and you need trust.

Harrowing but brilliant. September 2013; 431 pages.

Books about war in this blog can be found on this page.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar" by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Why anyone would want to be a Politburo member given that most of them spent every day and most nights terrified that the KGB would take them, torture them and murder them and if not them their wives. Whenever they talked to Stalin there was a risk they would say the wrong thing. Amazingly, many of them did dare to disagree and some of those got away with it. But many of them were terrified much of the time. Is power really that alluring?

How on earth they got any work done given that Stalin would invite them night after night to dinners which went on till the early hours in which they all got drunk. But at the same time they were running huge ministries and fiefdoms.

Some times they competed for Stalin's approval beyond decency. His chef de cabinet was so proud when his daughter was chosen to present a bouquet to Stalin on his seventieth birthday, despite that fact that Stalin had murdered the girl's mother, the chef's wife. The little girl, now an old woman, still admires Stalin.
 
This book is a fascinating description of the courtiers of power, those who are willing to debase and humiliate themselves, to lie, cheat and kill, and do anything to stay close to the centre of power. Stalin's court was a gangster mob of brutal thugs who were terrified of him and yet unable to stop themselves looting, stealing, having orgies.
 
It is also an amazing chronicle of the madness of torture and the gullibility of those who believed that there might have been smoke behind fire. One KGB boss, arrested and tortured, confessed to having sex with his son and his daughter, and his KGB boss, and breaking into the British Embassy and having sex with the Ambassador!
 
I hadn't realised that Stalin's secret police used the crude torture method of beating people until their eyes popped out. I thought they were sophisiticated a la Darkness at Noon.
 
As well as all the evil, the book is a tribute to the endurance of people. Men and women who slaved in labour camps for ten years. Soliders who were tortured and then called back during the war to fight alongside their torturers.
 
And survivors. Molotov survived Stalin, Khruschev and Brezhnev, dying after Gorbachov had gained power. Stalin's daughter Svetlana spent some time in sheltered housing in Bristol. Mikoyan, who had carried Lenin's coffin, attended JFK's funeral.
 
But my favourite is Lenin's chef who had previously cooked for Rasputin and later cooked for Stalin. He became Vladimir Putin's grandfather!