It is 1919, in the small village of Yazyk in Siberia. A remnant of the Czecholovak Legion is marooned there in the aftermath of the Great War and the Russian Revolution, and it is in Yazyk that powerful belief systems collide. The Czechs, Meek dryly explains, have fought a confusing war:

“for the Emperor of the Austrians against the Emperor of the Russians…for the Emperor of the Russians against the Red Terror…with Socialist Revolutionaries and Cossacks against Cossacks and Socialist Revolutionaries…without once compromising their ideals.”

The Czechs long to go home, but home is a newborn Republic they have never seen. Their own mixed political opinions lead to much comedy in places: embryonic socialists no longer know how to address an officer of a superior caste although they are good natured enough to obey; the same budding good natured socialists, less amusingly, are also capable of a horrendous war crime which haunts them. Like most of the characters in this book, the Czechs wear many faces.

Also present in Yazyk is a strange closed Russian community, the Skoptsky (castrates), who believe they become angels, pure as Adam before the Fall, by ridding themselves of their ‘Keys to Hell’. Disgusted by the corruption and cruelty all around them, they hold all possessions in common and live on ecstatic visions of heaven and hell. Apart from their tendency to self mutilation, the Skoptsky are a pacific community and suffer for it. The socialists praise their virtue and steal their chickens; the Tsarists call them traitors and steal their horses; the Bolsheviks come and declare them free but steal their food; the Czechs take over the village and everything in the village becomes theirs.

The idea that people are there to be preyed upon, even by those who claim to love and care for them, is exemplified shockingly by Samarin, a charismatic political prisoner who has escaped from ‘The White Garden,’ a prison camp near the Arctic, and found his way to Yazyk. He tells of being assisted in his escape by a criminal who, it transpires, has only brought him along as a living food supply. This criminal, The Mohican, is a strange and savage creature, passionless and calculating, entirely without malice, entirely ruthless. Not since Solzhenitsyn have the horrors of camp life been so dispassionately and grippingly described.

Murder soon follows the arrival of Samarin, who is dogged by the Mohican. A shaman blessed with visions is the first to die, much to the fury of Matula, the Czech Captain, who is a brute and a bully and keeps the Shaman chained up in a kennel because of his interest in hearing about the shaman’s spiritual visions. The irony of the contrast between Matula’s interests and his behaviour is vicious and everywhere. His particular enemy is Mutz, an officer under his command. He delights in tormenting him for his Jewishness and because he cannot forgive that Mutz once saved his life. The scenes between Mutz and Matula are full of masterly edginess – one in particular, where Matula veers between killing Mutz and asking a favour is that old cliché ‘nailbiting’ made new and meaningful again. Poor Mutz lives on a knife edge and can only trust Matula retrospectively :

“You trusted that he had not killed you, rather than that he would not.”

There’s a love story too in Yazyk. Anna is a widow, self described, but actually the wife of Balsahov, who became a castrate. The couple had been much in love – their wedding night is lyrically and beautifully described. They had a child. They were happy. And yet the husband sacrifices all for this strange belief of his. And that is a theme of this book – that it is not enough for men to live – they must have beliefs which go against their own natures, which damage them, in order to feel …what?

Anna also has an affair with Mutz, good, kind orderly rational Mutz, but she looks always for passion and love, to feel ‘light and clean.’ Her longing for passion and emotion are doomed to failure with the men of this village, torn as they are by their conflicting and conflicted beliefs and ideas. Her husband, for example, who ended their marriage in any real sense, is jealous when she takes a lover. There is an uneasy scene with her final lover, Samarin the revolutionary, when they sing to one another – songs of love and death, the twin passions of the leading character in the book. Samarin posits the idea that everything is justified to the revolutionary when he knows his destiny is to save the world. Poor Anna’s commonsensical retort , that such a man would be very vain indeed, falls on deaf ears. And when her beloved son is treacherously injured, her cry that “I wish my boy were more important to the world than this’ is the cry of all Russia and not heard by the men who come to save the world.

For in truth, in Meek’s world, there is no hope. Scene after scene demonstrates the helplessness of ordinary people at the hands of the savage protectors of mankind, and no doctrine offers any hope. Nuns rush over a sick man to be in a religious procession; Bolsheviks, full of the love of mankind, good natured in themselves, will yet execute mindlessly in the name of their cause; a pretentious revolutionary hero will use his fames a justification for abandoning his family and seducing eager young Marxists. The backdrop to the story of love and murder is peopled by peasants starving by the roadside, by workers being whipped up to protest by revolutionaries who then abandon them to the Cossacks because they themselves are too important to be arrested or killed, by women in despair at the cruelty they suffer from all quarters.

The characters are at their best when they fail their beliefs or betray their ideals – suddenly they have a human face – although they may despise themselves for weakness. In the end, some find redemption of a kind, some get their just desserts, some are left to face the bewilderment of a world in turmoil.

This is a rich and satisfying book full of black humour and grim insights into human nature, which no matter what ideology or faith it comes disguised in, remains irrefutably the same as it always was.

Marion Arnott lives in Paisley, Scotland. She was winner of the Phillip Good Memorial Prize For Women's Fiction 1998, CWA Short Dagger 2001 and shortlisted for CWA Short Dagger 2002. Work has appeared in Scottish Child, West Coast, Solander Magazine, Peninsula , QWF, Hayakawa Mystery Magazine (Japan), Books Ireland, Northwords, Chapman, Crimewave, and Datlow and Winding's Year's Best Fantasy and Horror volume 15. Her short story collection 'Sleepwalkers,' was published in August, 2003 by Elastic Press. To visit Marion's Showcase on this website, click here

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.