Review: The Winter Queen, by Boris Akunin
Translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield
Random House, 2003. 242 pp. $13

One fine May afternoon in 1876, a young man of wealth and excellent prospects shoots himself in Moscow’s Alexander Gardens. At first, the police assume that his suicide is merely an instance of youth disaffected with life, resembling other, similar cases from recent months. Chalk the violence up to the nihilism of the young generation that doesn’t appreciate how wonderful Russian life is, and call the case closed.

But that theory, though conveniently self-congratulatory, fails to account for crucial circumstances. Why would a young man kill himself when, to all appearances, he had everything to live for? Why, at the time he shot himself, did another young man, an interested onlooker, run away? Why did the suicide’s revolver have only one bullet in the cylinder, which he spun before shooting himself? (That deadly game, by the way, bears the name “American roulette” in these pages.) Finally, who stood to benefit financially from the young man’s death?

The only copper to question these oddities is an oddity himself, nineteen-year-old Erast Fandorin. A former university student of well-to-do background left impoverished by his father’s inopportune death, Fandorin has chosen the police, of all careers for which his talents might have prepared him. Socially shy but physically courageous when the job demands, he speaks several languages, works diligently, is incorruptible, believes in justice, and lives according to the dictum that a gentleman keeps his word (perhaps because of the English nanny who had such an influence on him).

One may ask, as his superiors never do (though they privately wonder) why this boy is a cop. They might also wonder how he’ll survive. The answer? He’s lucky, not just astute. In a clever stroke that’s typical of the novel, Fandorin wears a corset out of vanity—and when the garment’s tough exterior saves his life, he’s grateful but embarrassed. That tells you what you need to know.

Fandorin reminds me of a somewhat more worldly version of Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. But The Winter Queen reads more like Tolstoy—a concise Tolstoy, to be sure—as with this description of the garden in the opening scene:

The public strolling the alleyways between blossoming lilac bushes and flower beds ablaze with the flaming scarlet blooms of tulips was smartly decked out: ladies holding aloft lacework parasols (to avert the threat of freckles), nannies minding children in neat little sailor suits, and young men affecting an air of boredom in fashionable cheviot frock coats or jackets cut in the short English fashion. With nothing apparently portending any disagreeable turn of events, a lazy satisfaction and gratifying tedium suffused the atmosphere, mingling with the scents of a mature and confident spring season.

The narrative seems Tolstoyan too, with gaming tables, beautiful women, break-ins, shootouts, enemies becoming sworn friends in a heartbeat, and marvelous coincidences all playing a part. This is decadent Russia as literature has portrayed it, and though some of it’s tongue in cheek and very funny, other parts are deadly serious.

Whichever the case, little that happens fulfills expectations, at least not entirely. But despite enough misdirection to cause a continental traffic jam, the attentive reader will figure out who the real villains are before Fandorin does. In a book as brief and fast-moving as this, that doesn’t bother me. But the jacket blurb that calls Akunin the “Russian Ian Fleming” surely exaggerates.

The Winter Queen is more thriller than mystery, though what appears a simple crime of violence sets off the action. As the story progresses, Fandorin acquires state security clearance, so he’s no longer a policeman. The threat of an international conspiracy, the constant “no—and furthermore” that complicates our hero’s path but makes the pages turn, and the larger-than-life characters he meets make the narrative feel appropriately grand. The stakes have risen enormously since the opening scene and suicide, far greater than the motive for a single gunshot.

At times, the comic-opera tone feels studied and grates, so that the reader’s unspoken question, “What now?” occasionally comes with a grimace, not just pure anticipation. That comic tone also clashes with the ending, as if the author were trying to pull the rug out from under everything all at once, which I find too tricky by half and ungenerous besides. Still, Akunin (a pen name) has written at least ten Fandorin adventures and is apparently much beloved in Russia and abroad. It’s easy to see why.

I’m glad to have sampled one of his tales, but I’m not sure I’d read another, engaging as The Winter Queen is.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.