The People’s Act of Love

James Meek

Canongate

Otago Daily Times , October 29th 2005

There is something about Russia that brings out the epic in a novel. Which is not to say that The People’s Act of Love is a brick of a book (it is in fact a restrained 400 pages), rather that the geographic and historical expanse of the country provide an architectural space in which the narrative hangs like a rose window in a great cathedral.  And the scope of the story, too, is vast.

The year is 1919, and the village of Yazyk is a universe unto itself, isolated by both civil war and the winter wasteland of Siberia.  Within the town, two communities live under an uneasy and claustrophobic truce.  The native inhabitants are members of a Christian sect for whom castration – the remaking of themselves into the likeness and form of angels – is  the way to salvation.  Stationed among them is a disparate band of Czech soldiers who have spent 5 years fighting another country’s wars-for the Austrians against the Russians, for the Russians against the Austrians, for the White Russians against the Red and for Red against the White.  Tired and dispirited, they wish only to return to the newly created Czecholovakia but cannot move without the order of their new President.  A complex series of interrelationships, fed by an undercurrent of jealousy and suppressed violence, link the two groups.  Key among these are the enigmatic leader of the Castrati, Balashov, the psychopathic Czech commander, Matula and his Lieutenant, Munz, and Munz’ some-time lover, the war widow Anna Petrovna.  Into this volatile world comes an escaped convict, the charismatic and mysterious Samarin, who claims that he is being pursued by a cannibalistic murderer known only as ‘The Mohican’.  The violent deaths of a local shaman and a soldier cast the entire village into a nightmare of fear and suspicion, from which there can only be one outcome.

It is impossible in the space of a short review to do justice to the intricacies of this extraordinary work, but the author, James Meek, the Guardian’s science correspondent, brings his skills as a journalist to this novel both in his writing ability and in the research behind it.  He himself lived and worked as a reporter in the former Soviet Union for 8 years, and amazingly enough much of book is based in fact, even though the story itself is fictional.  The People’s Act of Love thoroughly deserved its place in this year’s Booker long-list, and in a year when even Ian McEwan missed the cut, that is no mean feat.