Edmonton Journal
http://www.edmontonjournal.com
March 3, 2012
Tom Rob Smith
Grand Central Publishing
467 pp; $28.99
Josef Stalin perfected the art of unfriending long before Mark Zuckerberg came along, though, admittedly, the Facebook experience is markedly more pleasant than the technique employed in the USSR through the 1940s. Back then you would have received a midnight visit from the secret police followed by swift execution or exile, as well as your official removal from the record books. Indeed, the clumsily doctored photographs from that particularly mad time in Russian history, with their ghostly shadows where once a human stood, would be funny if they were weren’t so tragic.
British author Tom Rob Smith burst onto the literary scene in 2008 with Child 44, a novel whose protagonist, Leo Demidov, is a star of Stalin’s state security police, the MGB (the precursor to the KGB). Demidov was someone who had a hand in unfriending — or in another verbalization for our times, disappearing — any number of dangerous people, like school teachers and secretaries. Eventually, though, he comes to see what a big ideological dupe he has been, a realization that causes Stalin to dispatch him with a one-way ticket to Siberia. At the same time, a series of horrific child murders is taking place (Smith used the actual case of Andrei Chikatilo, a serial murderer of children, as a point of departure), except that the government will not admit that a serial killer can exist in Uncle Joe’s communist paradise. The murders continue until Leo solves them and achieves some measure of redemption. In the second book of the Sovet series, The Secret Speech, the new president, Nikita Khrushchev, has just issued his famous 1956 address denouncing Stalin and promising to right his wrongs. (And we all know how that turned out.) Meanwhile, someone with a grudge is threatening Leo and his family, and the story trips from the Siberian gulag to the revolution in Budapest, which the supposedly reformed USSR brutally suppressed.
This description of two books not under review here is a fairly unsubtle way of saying that you shouldn’t read Agent 6 without reading the other two novels first. You need to know the full background to appreciate the complicated story that unravels in Agent 6, which takes us ahead a few years to the early 1960s. The Cold War is in full bloom. Leo’s wife, Raisa, and their two adopted daughters travel to New York City as part of a peace tour, purportedly to foster better relations between the USSR and the US. Leo is forbidden to accompany his family, which sets his spidey sense a-tingle. Why has his family been invited? What is this trip really all about? When things go awry in New York his suspicions are confirmed. His request to travel to the U.S. to investigate the mishap is refused, and he tries to take matters into his own hands. The novel shifts across decades and continents, from an urban wasteland in the slums of New York City to another kind of wasteland — the one the Russians made out of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Leo will stop at nothing as he hunts the mysterious Agent 6, the only person who knows what really happened in New York.
Agent 6 is about such weighty themes as personal responsibility, guilt, shame, duty, decency and allegiance to ideology. It should be said that by the third novel, Leo and his increasingly dramatic and unlikely escapes from death start to remind you more of a Russian Jason Bourne than a literary hero, but this is a minor peccadillo. Smith writes a great thriller — he gives us a brooding, flawed but appealing main character and a gripping multilayered plot that takes place in a particularly dramatic period in world history. And although the Soviet system looks pretty bad, the U.S. government, with its hypocrisy and skulduggery, doesn’t come up smelling like roses either.
Child 44 was longlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize (somewhat unusually, given its genre) and won seven international awards, including the 2008 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for best thriller of the year. All three books in the trilogy are international bestsellers. Intelligent, riveting and horrifying, the whole series is quite unputdownable. Let’s hope Stalin is rolling in his grave.
Karen Virag is a local freelance reviewer.
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