You’ll be swept up in Fitch’s ‘Revolution’
If you’ve wondered what Janet Fitch has been up to since publishing Paint It Black in 2006, The Revolution of Marina M. (Little, Brown, 800 pp., out of four) should provide a partial answer.
Clocking in at 800 pages, her new novel, about a young woman coming of age in the tumult of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent civil war, is sprawling, immersive and heavily researched — and it’s only Part 1 of two.
After a brief prologue in Carmel by the Sea, where our heroine Marina Dmitrievna Makarova finds herself in 1932, the book travels back to 1916-19. These years mark a period of upheaval for both Russia and for Marina, a teenager “the same age as the century.”
Born to a bourgeoisie Petrograd family, she opposes the Tsarist regime from the comfort of her childhood bedroom, welcoming revolution with optimism: “Revolution. The great brazen sound of the word rang in my bones, resounded in the bell of my chest.”
Reality, of course, is an ugly, complicated thing, and Marina finds herself tossed between friends and family, enemies and lovers, just as Russia struggles to find its footing after several centuries of Tsarist rule.
Marina is a passionate young woman, a lover and a poet whose “stickyhanded heart wanted everything.” Her journey is deeply personal, rooted in her experiences and her body, but it is also inseparable from her country’s history, the volatile, high-level power struggles affecting every last person on the ground. The political backdrop shifts fast and often, as do Marina’s personal circumstances. Ideals clash with relationships, and she is forced to reset again and again, both by her conscience and for her survival. Her convictions de- stabilize as she sees the horrors brought on by purists immune to feeling.
Marina M. does not make for quick reading. It restarts several times, following the ruptures in the protagonist’s life. So while there is plenty of action and drama, this is an epic narrative that depends very little on the traditional rewards of plot. Thankfully, Fitch ( White Oleander) is an excellent writer.
“I felt like that again,” Marina says when she cuts off her long red hair, “a new woman emerging from a chrysalis of tresses and tangles, no longer the dreamy girl of former life, the one full of secrets and divisions, but someone I had not yet met.”
Each phase of her story builds on the last, and it’s a pleasure to see her develop, her character strengthening as she tries on new roles and new identities. Here’s the question for Volume 2, which will take us into the Soviet Union: Who are the Marinas we have not yet met?