Natasha Pulley
Bloomsbury
Otago Daily Times, September 24th 2022
Natasha Pulley’s fifth novel is a Kafka-esque love story that captures the surrealism of life in the USSR during the Cold War and asks hard questions about the ethical limits of scientific research. The story opens with the titular narrator, a middle-aged biochemist, being transported from a Siberian gulag to City 40, a newly-constructed town surrounded by miles of dying forest. Expecting to become a test subject in some painful and potentially fatal human trial, he is surprised to find himself seconded to the laboratory of his former supervisor, Elena Resovskaya, who is studying the effects of radiation on the ecosystem surrounding the facility.
According to Resovskaya, liquid waste was deliberately released into the water table, contaminating the soil and lakes with low-dose radiation to determine whether the flora and fauna could develop resistance. But if the radioactivity is as low as she suggests, why are researchers only allowed outside for 30 minutes a day, and why do the trees for miles around look as if they are rusting from within? Even more worryingly, why do none of City 40s other inhabitants seem at all concerned about it?
Valery’s discomfort is further heightened by the attentions of the head of security, Konstantin Shenkov, a disturbingly attractive man whose kindness must surely be intended to make punishment, when it comes, even more painful. But he is determined to find out the true extent and nature of the danger of Resovskya’s research, even if it gets him transported back to the Gulag or – more likely – killed.
Valery is a complicated and ambiguous character. On the one hand he delights in the scientific opportunity this represents “if [he] had been asked to fill out a form describing what heaven looked like…[it] would have been pretty damn close to this” and is not afraid to commit acts of violence in the name of justice. On the other, he is deeply traumatised by his years of imprisonment and willing to sacrifice his own life to protect the innocent. Shenkov, too, is full of contradictions: capable of executing those who threaten to expose City 40 to external scrutiny but a compassionate and courageous man when such attributes are needed most.
Pulley’s writing successfully conveys the intensely claustrophobic world of 1960s Russia, where it is taken for granted that everything one says and does is watched and nobody speaks the truth. Her story is all the more fascinating for being based on real events: In 1957, an explosion at a nuclear plant outside Chelyabinsk released millions of curies of radioactivity into the atmosphere and caused acute radiation sickness in citizens as far away as 60 miles away. Thousands of people were evacuated from the area, and a radioecological research centre was constructed at the blast site alongside a rebuilt nuclear facility, staffed by scientists forbidden from leaving or communicating with the outside world. We can only hope the experiments never went as far as this absorbing novel suggests.
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