Action thriller is vigorous but grisly
Novelist’s third Soviet-era page-turner is packed with historical detail, writes Nicholas Reid.
Of Russian-Jewish descent, TV presenter, pop historian and pop novelist Simon Sebag Montefiore has a couple of obsessions. One is Jerusalem, about which he wrote a busy, best-selling history. Another is old Soviet Russia, especially the Stalin era. Montefiore’s non-fiction includes two books about Stalin, his genocidal terror, and his cowed and sycophantic entourage.
Then Montefiore turned to writing novels. Sashenka was about a Bolshevik woman who fell foul of Stalin’s terror in the 1930s. One Night
in Winter was set just after World War II and concerned a bunch of schoolkids in an elite Soviet school who are at the centre of a nasty investigation by the NKVD. Although Montefiore’s novels can all be read separately, his third Soviet-era novel
Red Sky at Noon is in some ways a prequel to One Night in Winter.
In 1941, Josef Stalin is doublecrossed by his buddy and ally Adolf Hitler. In Operation Barbarossa, Hitler invades Russia. His forces easily smash their way through the Red Army, which has been depleted and weakened by Stalin’s purges. Thousands of square miles of Russian territory are captured, hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers become prisoners without a fight, and Hitler’s forces seem on the verge of crossing the Volga, capturing Stalingrad and effectively cutting the Soviet Union in two.
In panic, Stalin will do anything to avert this disaster. He agrees to allow some prisoners from the Gulag to serve in special ‘‘criminal’’ units, as longrange raiders behind German lines. If they shed their blood for the Motherland, they will have their criminal status removed.
Political prisoner Benya Golden is dragged out of Kolyma prison camp and allowed to join a cavalry unit of Cossacks who haven’t already deserted to the German side. As a Jew, Golden knows what a Nazi victory would mean for him.
Most of Red Sky at Noon concerns Golden’s adventures out on the steppes with the Cossacks, racing into skirmishes on horseback, waging guerrilla war against collaborators and trying to find and assassinate the Russian turncoat who runs ‘‘antipartisan’’ missions for the Nazis. The action is vigorous and swift but sometimes grisly, with scenes of torture and massacre.
As always, Montefiore’s level of historical accuracy is high. He is aware that large sections of the Soviet population were only too eager to collaborate with the Nazis. He is also aware that this war on the Eastern Front was waged with equal ferocity and pitilessness by both sides.
But in the end, this is essentially an airport-lounge action thriller. In an author’s note at the end, Montefiore admits that he was partly inspired by American Westerns. Call it a Cossack horse opera. Sometimes Montefiore’s dialogue sounds like a TV miniseries, with historical and political issues neatly spelled out by characters. Golden’s affair with a beautiful Italian nurse is strictly out of old Hollywood and a subplot about Stalin’s little daughter, Svetlana, seems a tack-on.
Still, it’s an easy page-turner and sure to be a hit with Montefiore fans.