{"id":354,"date":"2005-10-29T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-04T22:26:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/?p=354"},"modified":"2024-12-31T13:09:28","modified_gmt":"2024-12-31T00:09:28","slug":"the-peoples-act-of-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2005\/10\/29\/the-peoples-act-of-love\/","title":{"rendered":"The People&#8217;s Act of Love"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-large-font-size\"><strong>James Meek<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-large-font-size\"><em>Canongate<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\">Otago Daily Times , October 29th 2005<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">There is something about Russia that brings out the epic in a novel. Which is not to say that <em>The People\u2019s Act of Love<\/em> 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.\u00a0 And the scope of the story, too, is vast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">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.\u00a0 Within the town, two communities live under an uneasy and claustrophobic truce.\u00a0 The native inhabitants are members of a Christian sect for whom castration \u2013 the remaking of themselves into the likeness and form of angels \u2013 is\u00a0 the way to salvation.\u00a0 Stationed among them is a disparate band of Czech soldiers who have spent 5 years fighting another country\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Tired and dispirited, they wish only to return to the newly created Czecholovakia but cannot move without the order of their new President.\u00a0 A complex series of interrelationships, fed by an undercurrent of jealousy and suppressed violence, link the two groups.\u00a0 Key among these are the enigmatic leader of the Castrati, Balashov, the psychopathic Czech commander, Matula and his Lieutenant, Munz, and Munz\u2019 some-time lover, the war widow Anna Petrovna.\u00a0 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 \u2018The Mohican\u2019.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">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,\u00a0the Guardian\u2019s science correspondent, brings his skills as a journalist to this novel both in his writing ability and in the research behind it.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 <em>The People\u2019s Act of Love<\/em> thoroughly deserved its place in this year\u2019s Booker long-list, and in a year when even Ian McEwan missed the cut, that is no mean feat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>James Meek<\/p>\n<p>\nOtago Daily Times review October 29th 2005<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[32,370,421,43,18],"class_list":["post-354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-32","tag-fiction","tag-historical","tag-james-meek","tag-odt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1344,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354\/revisions\/1344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}