As someone who reads little contemporary crime fiction, I have taken to reading the highly acclaimed debut novels of each year. Tana French’s In the Woods (2007), Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 (2008), and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009). I haven’t come to the latter one yet because I can’t decide whether to wait for the entire trilogy to come out though I am supposed to know from experience that buying a series for a book is monetarily and temporally a mistake.
I am glad I didn’t wait for Tom Rob Smith’s alleged trilogy to come out in its entirety. Child 44 is a book with one of the best and most well-written settings in recent times. I was cynical about the appalling conditions in Stalinist Soviet as an Englishman’s attempt to milk those unknown periods, despite Smith’s list of references. But I slowly had to give in. Whether or not the cannibalistic streaks during the Ukraine famine, the usage of camphor for torture, and the umpteen other brutalities are entirely factual, Smith’s writing was vivid enough to thrust me down the pensieve to those times.
War hero-turned-MGB Agent Leo Demidov’s life begins to fall apart when he accidentally begins an eye-opening course that he did not enroll for. His subordinates, superiors, wife, and the beloved perfect society he has been helping build, all show him their true faces at once, forcing him to see his own past deeds in a new light. In his desire to redeem himself as a human, he independently takes up a life-threatening investigation to solve the shocking child murders that everybody denies. Ironically, he too was in denial about one of those murders and now makes that child his poster boy.
I chuckled at a few situations filled with melodrama, and every time Leo stripped his shirt to show the photos he taped to his body. The perilous investigation by itself could have made a fascinating story, but Smith chose to intertwine it with Leo’s own eye-opening course which ends only when he encounters the serial killer and the result made me gasp. Smith did it by regularly sharing secrets, allowing the readers to smugly believe that they have predicted everything while the master stroke is so neat that it takes the upper hand irrespective of whether the reader predicted it a page before or not.
The serial killer is based on the real Russian killer Andrei Chikatilo. I recommend reading about him after completing the novel.
The characters are very human, capable of humanity and bestiality in the oddest moments, but they are not as memorable as the setting. That is fine because Stalinist Soviet is the antagonist here. I can’t remember another book where the setting plays the antagonist, definitely not to such an ominous omnipotent degree.
Smith chose a unique style in writing dialogue. He italicized them without any tags. It may have been done for some artistic reason, but I could not appreciate it even though one quickly gets used to it. Action tags serve a definite purpose. Moreover, Smith shows a tendency to hop heads with third person POV.
I read Child 44 a couple of books ago. While I moved on to other books, I became entangled in the web reading about child serial rapist-killer-cannibals like Andrei Chikatilo and Albert Fish, about Stalinist and post-Stalinist USSR, about Smith’s second novel The Secret Speech, about the eponymous speech delivered by Nikita Khruschev, and finally the personality cult.
Image Sources: Tom Rob Smith on MySpace
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