Donald Rayfield
Bloodbath
Siberian Education
By Nicolai Lilin (Translated by Jonathan Hunt)
Canongate 447pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
If you would prefer Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs without their ingenious wit and structure, this may be a book for you. A pitiless juvenile and his gang go out on a series of vindictive knifings and shootings, avenging insults and offences according to an esoteric, quasi-religious code of thieves’ honour (with intervals of torture and male rape by what pass for the authorities), which finally escalates to a murder that would make Tarantino blanch: the execution of four naked Ukrainians in an SUV, ostensibly to avenge their rape of an autistic girl. All this takes place in Bendery and Tiraspol on the border of Ukraine and Moldova, in the breakaway enclave of Transnistria, that last remnant of the USSR, so dubious that even Nauru and Nagorno-Karabakh don’t recognise it. The narrative mode of the book is strange: sometimes, an anthropologist seems to be describing the traditions of a hitherto unknown Siberian ethnos who combine utterly ruthless criminality with the religious punctiliousness of the Exclusive Brethren, their traditions embodied in a Grandfather Kuzya who guides the juvenile hero and his friends on when, whom, how and with what weapon to maim and kill. At other times, author and reader wallow in a pornography of violence. The teenaged autobiographical hero does not develop: after the final bloodbath, he contemplates the beauty of nature, and is then called up into the Russian army in Chechnya (which will be the subject of Nicolai Lilin’s next work, Free Fall).
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Only in Britain, perhaps, could spy chiefs – conventionally viewed as masters of subterfuge – be so highly regarded as ethical guides.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-spy-who-taught-me
In this month's Bookends, @AdamCSDouglas looks at the curious life of Henry Labouchere: a friend of Bram Stoker, 'loose cannon', and architect of the law that outlawed homosexual activity in Britain.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-gross-indecency
'We have all twenty-nine of her Barsetshire novels, and whenever a certain longing reaches critical mass we read all twenty-nine again, straight through.'
Patricia T O'Conner on her love for Angela Thirkell. (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad