THE ZOO

by Christopher Wilson (Faber £12.99)

IT’S a perverse quirk of history that dictatorships are good for literature: the world would be a poorer place without Kafka and others who have wrested extraordinary novels from the bleakest of political circumstances.

In a nod to the way many of these novels adopted surrealism as the only reasonable response to regimes that defy reality, Christopher Wilson, who incidentally lives in North London, has imagined life inside Stalin’s inner circle from the offkilter perspective of a 12-year-old boy.

Yuri has a unique worldview, thanks to a childhood head injury, but has become an unlikely confidant of the Great Leader, after he and his veterinary dad were dragged from their beds one night to tend to Stalin’s worsening health.

Pretty much everyone around him, apart from his dad, dismisses Yuri as an idiot, but like Lear’s Fool, Yuri has an unerring ability also to see the truth.

Wilson mines great power from the contrast between Yuri’s faux naif voice and the horror of what he is invariably describing and, even if this novel isn’t in the same league as its literary forebears, it’s still shockingly funny.