Nightmare Escapism

There’s a sense of survivor’s grandchild’s guilt in Benioff’s dark picaresque, set during the Siege of Leningrad, which sends two teens on a quest to find a dozen eggs (in a city where people are eating dirt) for a Soviet colonel in exchange for a pardon of execution. In the first chapter, David, the screenwriter, the one married to Amanda Peet and living off his scripts for ephemeral epics like Troy and The Kite Runner, goes down to Florida to find out, once and for all, whether it’s true that grandpa Lev killed two German soldiers before he turned 18. He wants to write a book about it. Pestered by David’s intrusive questions, Lev tells him not to sweat the details.

“You’re a writer,” he says. “Make it up.” It’s a brilliant framing device – more so for being untrue; the author’s grandparents were all born in the U.S. Benioff, who hit the big time after Spike Lee adapted his novel The 25th Hour, knows how to hook you. But he also knows that the hook has to stay in, and he treats his fake grandfather’s fake story with all the care and affection he’d shower on his own flesh and blood. Ultimately, this will become the novel’s greatest weakness.

But first, the suffering – the central character in these books’ opening tableaux. While young Lev’s story begins in a half-abandoned apartment building in the middle of winter, with German planes strafing from above and cannibals afoot below, Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 opens with two brothers’ hunt for a delectable house cat in the snowy woods outside their village. Dateline: Ukraine, 1933, during perhaps the worst state-mandated famine in history. A furious and blurry hunt sequence, cut short when Andrei’s brother Pavel is snatched by a stranger, presumably for food, becomes the origin story of Smith’s thriller 20 years later (the year Stalin died).

In both novels, there are two distinct enemies, tightening like a vise around our heroes. One is well defined: the Nazi commandant whom Lev and his partner Kolya must confront in City of Thieves; a serial killer eviscerating children and filling their mouths with bark in Child 44. The other foe, in both books, is the State, and it’s more dangerous in the sense that it co-opts the mind, dangling over its people the one commodity that can’t be spared: survival.

Leo Demirov, Smith’s idealistic detective, at first parrots the party line of the MGB (the state security force that emerged from the barbaric Cheka before becoming the more subtly brutal KGB). He’s also well versed in the realpolitik of its interrogation methods: when he tells a woman, “The pressure is on you to prove your loyalty to the State. There is no pressure on us to prove your guilt,” he knows deep down that she’s guilty of nothing more than befriending a bookish veterinarian. His idealism has ossified into cant, but his fine living conditions and beautiful wife keep him dishonest. Cue the abject awakening, during the coerced confession of said veterinarian – the cracking open of a “denial which sat dormant in the pit of his stomach like an undigested seed pod,” as Smith puts it rather clumsily.

A run-in with an ambitious underling makes him a suspected traitor. Thus his eyes are opened to a series of connected murders that have been pinned on assorted deviants in order to uphold the Communist doctrine that in a perfect state, “there is no crime.”

Pity the maverick Stalinist detective. No desk duty for this loose cannon in way too deep on a murder case, no punitive partnership with a comically inept rookie. Just a bullet to the back of the head if he’s lucky, maybe a little torture if he isn’t.

If the milieu of Smith’s novel (based on the true story of a Soviet serial killer) adds ingenious moral layers to the lone-wolf-cop genre, Smith’s tendency to telegraph and repeat his themes undermines his rich material. We are constantly being reminded that Soviet doctrine denied the agency of the individual. Duh.

The writing does sometimes match the taut precision of the plot, and in these instances the prose sheds genuine light. In a more reticent novel it would shine brighter. “Did his work have meaning or was it merely a means to survive?” Leo asks himself. “There was nothing shameful about trying to survive – it was the occupation of the majority.” Elsewhere, he observes, “To stand up for someone was to stitch your fate into the lining of theirs.”

It’s almost too easy to forget this tension – between pragmatism and idealism, between the instincts of survival and altruism – in Benioff’s City of Thieves. This is not just because Benioff draws a solid line between good guys and bad, but because his adventure is so smoothly told, so well balanced between horror and sweetness, that the rough patches become invisible (until a tacked-on ending that tips the story over into sentimentality, throwing irony overboard).

Not that Benioff stints on wartime privations. He deftly interweaves his research on how Siege inhabitants boiled down book bindings for food, starved in the city’s prisons after being held for petty theft, and listened to a continuous radio broadcast that affirmed the city still stood. But the sweetness emerges in a series of set pieces evoking the most effective of coming-of-age genres, the fairy tale (the kind by Grimm, not Disney). The boys follow a giant upstairs in search of eggs, only to find horrors far more graphically described than those in Little Red Riding Hood. Like Hansel and Gretel, they approach a farmhouse in the forbidding woods.

“Kolya crept over a frosted window and peeked inside, the sleek black fur of his Astrakhan cap shimmering in the firelight. Inside the house music played on a phonograph – jazz piano, something American.” Scantily clad women dance inside, but all is not as it seems. Gunfights and high-stakes chess games ensue, but by then the boys – a looter and a deserter – have learned their growing-up lessons, all with enough bawdy humor and swashbuckling to please any teen moviegoer. (Benioff hasn’t yet sold the film rights; Smith has, with Richard Price to write it and Ridley Scott to direct.)

And so maybe the ending of City of Thieves is too pat, its noble deaths a little too predictable. Where Smith overworks his themes in Child 44, Benioff wears his a little too lightly. But both stories have been artfully, rivetingly told, and two young and fortunate writers have earned the right to evoke a historical nightmare that makes Chandler’s L.A., and even Conrad’s Congo, look like Epcot Center kiddie rides.