Tom Rob Smith's first novel, Child 44, was pretty good.
The crushing logic of Stalinism made the concept of a serial killer unthinkable in Soviet society, so when NVK officer Leo Dermidov started to make linkages between child murders he was playing a very dangerous game, and his story was yet more compelling as he himself was as cold and brutal as his job demanded.
Based on the real case, but moved back a few years , Child 44 felt plausible and realistic. Smith followed this with The Secret Speech, which sees Dermidov caught up in the fallout from Khruschev's denunciation of Stalin, and in Budapest for the abortive Hungarian uprising. Again, promising terrain, but not as successful in that the author seemed compelled to add too much drama to what was already a highlyy dramatic storyline.
Agent 6 pulls back a little from the excesses of Speech, but again Smith aims for a broad canvas that he is unable to fill with great conviction. The book starts well, with a flashback to Dermidov's first meeting with his wife - not so much love at first sight as fear and loathing on her part - and a lesson in paranoia for a young recruit:
The safest way to write a diary was to imagine Stalin reading every word. Even exercising this degree of caution there was the risk of a slipped phrase, accidental ambiguity - a misunderstood sentence. Praise might be mistaken for mockery, sincere adulation taken as parody.
.....
From the perspective of the secret police, concealing a diary was a crime regardless of its content. It was an attempt to separate a citizen's public and private life, when no such a gap existed.
But the focus shifts to New York, and a communist singer, Jesse Austin, once a star, now shunned for his un-American views.
It takes two sides to fight a Cold War, and the FBI agent who targets Austin is as deeply unpleasant as the symmetry of the story demands. He is washed up, but his fire returns when a Russian choir comes to perform at the United Nations. The choir is led by Leo's wife, Raisa, and the party includes his two adopted daughters; you suspect this will not end well...
Without giving too much away, the story then leaps forward to Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, and on again to New York. It is a shame that a writer as gifted as Smith feels compelled to be so ambitious; the Afghan section lacks conviction and authenticity, like the work of a movie director determined to justify a big budget.
Agent 6 reminded me of Henning Mankell's Man from Beijing - some good characters, stretched to breaking point by the combination of unconvincing plot and an over ambitious desire to stride continents and history.
Both books are definitely worth reading but both authors can do so much better; so often in fiction, less is more.
- Review copy provided by Simon & Schuster
robe de soirée
Posted by: pletcherqty | 05/17/2013 at 08:41 AM