From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Set during the waning days of the Russian revolution, Meek's utterly absorbing novel (after
The Museum of Doubt) captivates with its depiction of human nature in all its wartime extremes. In 1919, the remote Siberian town of Yazyk contains a strange brew of humanity: the docile members of a mystical Christian sect, whose longing for purity drives them to self-mutilation; a small outfit of Czech troops, marooned by the civil war and led by the mad cocaine-snorting Captain Matula; and "the widow" Anna Petrovna, whose passion for worldly things (e.g., photography and men) isolates her from the devout townspeople. When the charismatic revolutionary, Samarin, trudges into town with a harrowing tale of escape from a distant labor camp and a dangerous philosophy, Yazyk becomes a theater of bloodshed and betrayal as well as heroism and compassion. Using the town as a microcosm of the larger war, Meek illuminates both perverted ideology and irrepressible humanity. With confident prose, layered storytelling and prodigious imagination, he combines scenes of heart-pounding action and jaw-dropping revelations with moments of quiet tension and sly humor. This original, literary page-turner succeeds both with its credible psychological detail and in its grandeur and sweep.
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* It's 1918, and the tides of revolution arrive at the farthest reaches of the czar's old empire. Bolshevik forces approach the Siberian village of Yasyk, where a company of mercenary Czech soldiers is stranded at the edge of nowhere, in a benighted place where shamans peer into the beyond with their third eye and Christian zealots grow more like angels by cutting off their "keys to hell." Out of the wild comes Samarin, a charismatic visionary of another sort who tells of his pursuit by a savage convict called "the Mohican." Meek's chiseled, gemlike prose feels vaguely translated, if not from Russian then directly from life itself--its smooth, shimmering surface disturbed by ominous upwellings. The reader is drawn along by a series of striking acts and incidents (Samarin inexplicably hacking off and burying the hand of a dead man), little puzzles that gradually resolve into a greater mystery that dwells deep within and far beyond the souls of Meek's meaty characters. Inviting comparison with Greene, Conrad, and Dostoyevsky, this is stunning, masterful fiction.
David WrightCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
