Hack in the USSR
A troika set in Stalin’s era ends with a saga of astonishing feats and overdone similes.
Swords! Sabres! Drunk Russians! Meth-amped Nazis! Simon Sebag Montefiore loves exclamation points! He needs a strict editor! Sebag, as he is generally known, is a British writer who specialises in Russian history and occasionally crosses over into fiction. His latest offering, Red Sky At Noon, completes a trilogy preceded by Sashenka and One Night in Winter. The latter has sold more than 100,000 copies, and the blurb on the back of this new effort puts him on the same level as Hilary Mantel. Oy vey! He is not.
The story is about 42-year-old Jewish writer Benya Golden, sentenced to 25 years’ hard labour in the Russian Gulags for political activism. It is 1942 and Hitler’s troops are moving swiftly across Ukraine towards Stalingrad. Mussolini’s soldiers have joined the Germans, and huge numbers of Russian fighters have surrendered or turned traitor. In desperation, Stalin orders the formation of Gulag prisoners into penal battalions who must fight or die.
So Benya and a motley bunch of cutthroat comrades with monikers such as “Smiley”, “Bette Davis” and “Speedy” ride into the fray, clinking their spurs as they vault into the saddle, laughing.
That’s just on page 4, with another 380 to go, covering all manner of rape, pillaging, murder, heroism, betrayal and astonishing feats of survival. Sebag’s writing style relies heavily on similes – an officer is “built like a low-slung cooking pot”; a guard’s “eyes bulged so gloopily behind his bottle-thick spectacles that they resembled hard-boiled eggs”.
Stalin’s presence looms throughout the narrative, first introduced as “a small, tired old man” in the Kremlin, wreathed in smoke from his – pretentious detail warning – “Herzegovina Flor cigarette”.
All the while, the battle and bloodshed are raging, Benya finds time to have a passionate love affair – of course he does – and we discover that in his past life, he had stayed at Maxim Gorky’s villa in Sorrento and “made love to Gorky’s Sicilian maid every afternoon”.
Mad touches like that made me giggle a little. So, too, did Sebag’s attempts to portray the secret grand passion of 16-year-old Svetlana Stalin, daughter of Stalin, who pursues an older writer, first by letter, then in person. “He held her so close that she sensed his strength and his virility.”
Fiction about reallife events is a tricky tightrope to walk. Some writers want to jam in as much detail as possible to underscore the breadth of their research but fall behind in terms of, say, the essentials of characterisation and believable dialogue. Most of the characters in Red Sky are as flat as a piece of paper (see, a simile!), while Benya is mildly attractive only because he is the most consistent presence.
Sebag is no Hilary Mantel. More like Barbara Cartland, with a jarring touch of sadism thrown in from time to time.
RED SKY AT NOON, by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Century $37)