In Many Guises

Alan Bilton (Watermark Press, $14)

It is 1919 and the Yellow House is an insane asylum on an estate in the middle of a Russian forest, a cold, muddy day’s walk at least to the next village. The White Army, or possibly only local bandits, are lurking, while the Reds are coursing through the region and rooting out any hint of resistance. When Death is coming from all directions, do you stay put, or flee?

“The Whites, the Reds, the Greens,” ruminates one character. “The only thing that matters is the black earth.”

The novel opens with two murders at the Yellow House, and continues with too many more to count. We see the helter-skelter of famine and civil war through the eyes of various characters: doctors, nurses, patients, lackeys, not to mention a could-be witch, a feminist grandma, a hungry cat and a devilish conman, known at various times as Tutyshkin, who is, like all Russian conmen, variously charming, cynical and incompetent:

At the far end of the meadow could be found a ditch of brackish water, one more half-collapsed out house, and the sharp nails of the estate’s outer fence. Beyond that was the old orchard from whence the shots had been fired. A string of crows lined up along a branch as if queuing for kerosene. Yellowing leaves jumped from the branches. The rain went on forever, like debt.

“And beyond the trees?” asked Tutyshkin.

“Beyond, sir?”

“If I were to make my way from the rear of the estate where would I be?”

The old retainer looked at the inspector in some degree of confusion.

“Why, nowhere, sir.”

“Nowhere?”

“Yes, sir. This is where the Yellow House ends.”

“Of course,” said the inspector, after a few seconds delay. “Good fellow.”

The End of the Yellow House is interesting and attractive for its engaging if short-lived characters and its lively faux-Russian proverb-spouting narrator, quipping as he speeds the novel along. At its grimmest, however, Bilton describes the interrogation of an innkeeper and his family by a crew of Chekist cutthroats. This particular chapter is as harrowing and shocking as an episode from Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago:

The Red Guards took Dymov and his wife into the barn and shot them. Their bodies were dumped next to those of Yegurov and Miska, their eldest. Jacob watched without moving. He was still holding the heavy ring of keys and seemed to be slowly sinking into the ground. A Chekist handed him a shovel and kicked him. The lad looked at the shovel and blinked, his body closed up like an arthritic hand. When the Chekist yelled again, the lad still didn’t move: everything felt too heavy and too hard. Finally, the soldier stabbed the boy’s boot with the spade and pushed him to the ground When Jacob got to his feet, whimpering and crying, the soldier offered him the shovel once more.

“Do you want the wolves to take your Mama and Papa?” he said. “Dig.”

Most of the novel is not as grim or coldblooded as that, but there are events so terrible they sober even a joker.

How or why a Welsh novelist found his way into writing a Russian civil war black comedy, inspired in part, it seems, by Gogol and Bulgakov, and egged on more recently perhaps by Eugene Vodolazkin, I don’t know. That’s a mystery, and maybe the book itself is or isn’t a mystery; to categorize it would require snipping off all the good parts.

Bilton, like this reader, is most actively engaged by the time, place and people. The narrator reflects: “Of course in the greater scheme of things, the identity of the murderer meant less than last year’s snow.”

- Bob Blaisdell

By Sergei Lebedev (New Vessel Press, $22.95) Translated by Antonina W. Bouis

Unfairly to both Lebedev and his prospective readers, early reviewers compared this novel to works by Le Carré.

It is unfair because there is only one Le Carré, just as there is only one Dostoyevsky.

And yet Lebedev is certainly akin to both Le Carré and Dostoyevsky, in that the majority of this novel takes place inside the characters’ minds. There is little dialog and just a bit of action moving the plot forward (there will be no comparisons to Clancy or Follett). The pace is almost glacial, a la Sokurov or Tarkovsky, often two steps back for each one forward, peeling away a layer of the past to show its imprint on the present, or, more specifically, on the lives of the main characters.

But the comparisons should stop there. Lebedev is a fine writer to be judged on his own merits, and not in comparison to some standard bearer. The novel is a thoughtful consideration of human character, science, and the costs of manipulating the line between life and death.

Lebedev’s tale tracks the lives of two characters, neither of which is likeable.

Kalitin is a prodigal scientist, raised in the Soviet closed city system, who has developed an incalculably toxic poison, Neophyte, that leaves no trace of its use. But he betrays his homeland after he feels it has betrayed him – the collapsed USSR failing to provide the support and entitlements that he considered his due.

Shershnev is a troubled, rather unlucky intelligence officer who has been tasked with hunting Kalitin down and doing him in with a bit of his own poison. But Shershnev is haunted by his own demons: innocents he has tortured, loved ones he has neglected

The two are

connected like sound and echo, like a pair of substances composing a binary poison. The scientist created a substance, Shershnev deployed it; they shared all the real work, took the risk. Shershnev sensed it was wrong for them now to be once again forced together.

But it is Kalitin’s life and work that is the novel’s central focus, for we are naturally intrigued to understand how one can do what he does and rationalize his place in the world:

Kalitin believed he was a creator alongside other creators, since he did not draw water from some black well, did not find inspiration in blood and suffering… Anyone who condemned him simply did not know that the same wind and sunsets ran in his blood as in that of any other gifted person; Neophyte was as much a product of inspiration, risk, and art as was the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and Mendeleev’s table of element.

While Kalitin succeeds in his goal of creating an untraceable killer, the tradeoff is that Neophyte is also uncontrollable – it exercises an absolute power that even he cannot contain.

Notably, Lebedev was spurred to write Untraceable after the notorious 2018 poisoning in Salisbury of Sergei and Yulia Skripal with the very traceable nerve agent Novichok. So the novel twists around the Aesculapian rod of Russian history, contemplating the roots and context of modern evils that may have sprung from there, while showing once again that, in the end, history often turns on forgotten forces, on simple, and easily avoidable, human errors. And the best way to cope with that reality, as one character notes (of course to himself), is to remember that “there are times and countries that are like minefields, and the walker knows where he steps.”

– Paul Richardson