Review by Booklist Review
It's 1918, and the tides of revolution arrive at the farthest reaches of the czar's old empire. Bolshevik forces approach the Siberian village of Yasyk, where a company of mercenary Czech soldiers is stranded at the edge of nowhere, in a benighted place where shamans peer into the beyond with their third eye and Christian zealots grow more like angels by cutting off their keys to hell. Out of the wild comes Samarin, a charismatic visionary of another sort who tells of his pursuit by a savage convict called the Mohican. Meek's chiseled, gemlike prose feels vaguely translated, if not from Russian then directly from life itself--its smooth, shimmering surface disturbed by ominous upwellings. The reader is drawn along by a series of striking acts and incidents (Samarin inexplicably hacking off and burying the hand of a dead man), little puzzles that gradually resolve into a greater mystery that dwells deep within and far beyond the souls of Meek's meaty characters. Inviting comparison with Greene, Conrad, and Dostoyevsky, this is stunning, masterful fiction. --David Wright Copyright 2005 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Set during the waning days of the Russian revolution, Meek's utterly absorbing novel (after The Museum of Doubt) captivates with its depiction of human nature in all its wartime extremes. In 1919, the remote Siberian town of Yazyk contains a strange brew of humanity: the docile members of a mystical Christian sect, whose longing for purity drives them to self-mutilation; a small outfit of Czech troops, marooned by the civil war and led by the mad cocaine-snorting Captain Matula; and "the widow" Anna Petrovna, whose passion for worldly things (e.g., photography and men) isolates her from the devout townspeople. When the charismatic revolutionary, Samarin, trudges into town with a harrowing tale of escape from a distant labor camp and a dangerous philosophy, Yazyk becomes a theater of bloodshed and betrayal as well as heroism and compassion. Using the town as a microcosm of the larger war, Meek illuminates both perverted ideology and irrepressible humanity. With confident prose, layered storytelling and prodigious imagination, he combines scenes of heart-pounding action and jaw-dropping revelations with moments of quiet tension and sly humor. This original, literary page-turner succeeds both with its credible psychological detail and in its grandeur and sweep. Six-city tour. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Guardian journalist Meek (The Museum of Doubt) sets his fourth novel in the remote reaches of Siberia at the time of the Russian Revolution and ensuing civil war. At the lonely outpost of Yazyk, a group of Czech soldiers stranded in Russia at the end of World War I amid a sect of castrates are caught up in the machinations of their renegade leader, the approach of Red troops, and the predations of a lurking cannibal. Anna Petrovna, a well-bred Russian photographer, eventually becomes involved or embroiled with one of the Czech officers, the cannibal, and the leader of the castrate sect. There are so many good things about this novel that one wants to praise it to the skies: exotic setting, well-drawn characters, historical accuracy, intriguing plot. Yet for all the excitement-from castration to cannibalism-the narrative thrust often goes slack, freighted with such devices as a letter (20 book pages long) and a 30-page "story" which the author expects to carry us along. Instead of becoming the page-turner it might have been, the novel instead has an almost documentary feel, with touches of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the ruminations of the main characters. Recommended for larger fiction collections and Russian studies collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/05.]-Edward Cone, New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
