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Tag Archives: 1930

Wheels Within Wheels: Gallows Court

18 Monday Oct 2021

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1930, Alfred Hitchcock, beautiful mastermind, book review, emotional transitions, fear and uncertainty, historical fiction, inner life, intricate plot, London, Martin Edwards, mystery, sensationalist journalism, vigilante justice

Review: Gallows Court, by Martin Edwards
Sourcebooks/Poisoned Pen, 2018. 349 pp. $16

Jacob Flint, a young man on the make in 1930 London, has a way of winding up at murder scenes before the police do. For an ambitious journalist, such luck can be a gold mine, the source of scoops that rock the city and make his name. However, that particular happenstance also rouses suspicions from the police, who, though unimaginative — aren’t they always? — assume it’s no coincidence at all. Further, the perpetrators of these crimes, whoever they are, seem methodical, persistent, and absolutely ruthless, so that witnesses have a way of disappearing. Consequently, Jacob’s good fortune could be hazardous to his health.

Further, as he tries to piece together the killings, which seem to multiply before his eyes in the most unlikely circumstances, he keeps crossing paths with the mysterious Rachel Savernake — or almost does. The wealthy, reclusive Miss Savernake shows her lovely face only when she wishes, for as long as she wishes, and to select few. Jacob tries frequently to get in touch with her, but he succeeds only when she grants permission, and only on her terms.

Fleet Street, London’s traditional home of the print and newspaper industries, as it appeared in 1953, decorated for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation (courtesy Anthony Harrison, geograph.org.uk, via Wikimedia Commons)

Jacob believes she’s the thread that connects the murders; she even presented the solution to one of them to the police. Her ability, intelligence, and boldness make her an object of fear, admiration, and bafflement. Rumor says that as a teenager, she had her half-sister’s parents disposed of, on a whim. So what game is she playing? And why does she take an interest in Jacob, leading him — he thinks — to the scene of the next crime?

This is the elaborate premise for one of the most ingenious, Byzantine mysteries I’ve ever read. Normally I dislike mystery narratives in which bodies fall like overripe apples from a tree, especially if I sense that the story needs another corpse to keep the tension thrumming. Not so, here. Everything fits, and Jacob’s emotional reactions matter, not just how he plans his next move. Edwards doesn’t rush through those emotional transitions, and the novel benefits greatly.

I wouldn’t call Gallows Court character-driven or deeply thoughtful, yet Jacob has an inner life, with ambition warring against a sense of morality and fair play. He has an appealing urge to connect with other humans, even if he doesn’t always know how, and his shock when people in whom he’s placed his trust wind up betraying him feels genuine. When people he knows wind up dead, some of whom he called friend, he takes stock — not for long, necessarily, but so that you see his impulses. He also struggles to put forth his better nature when self-preservation or convenience pulls in another direction, as in this passage, when he visits a dying friend and colleague:

The stench of disinfectant and the coarse noise from the bed made Jacob’s flesh crawl. Not for the first time, he felt pangs of self-disgust. A man who had, in his no-nonsense way, been generous to him was close to death. Yet here he was, averting his eyes, holding his nose, struggling in vain to overcome revulsion. He uttered a silent, selfish prayer that Betts would not die while he sat by his bedside. How could he console the widow if the worst happened? It would seem like his fault.

Rachel’s much harder to figure, and though that follows logically from the author’s need to keep certain secrets, I could better understand Jacob’s fascination with her if her character came across more clearly. As it is, Rachel risks being a trope, the beautiful mastermind whom no one can get around, let alone fathom. She has a mission, it seems — which the reader divines before Jacob does — and which explains the profusion of deaths. That the mission attempts to strike a blow for justice helps some.

More importantly, Rachel provides the overriding sense of the novel, the confusion, uncertainty, and danger infusing the very air of the story. Just when Jacob believes that he sees how the wheels turn, he realizes that there are wheels within wheels. At best, he’s a minor cog, one that may intersect with a larger, more significant mechanism, but only as long as he’s useful. When pursuing a lead based on information given him, he never knows whether his informant has hidden motives or means him ill. This atmosphere of fear and uncertainty feels pervasive, as in Hitchcock, and the ever-present “no — and furthermore” applies the framework. But the workings are entirely psychological.

The last two turns of the wheel feel a little contrived, the only ones that do. Nevertheless, Gallows Court delivers a tense, wild ride, and if the ending seems a bit contrived, it’s also satisfying.

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

Happiness in Siberian Exile: Zuleikha

20 Monday Sep 2021

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1930, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, book review, Guzel Yakhina, historical fiction, kulaks, literary fiction, male oppression, masochism, power struggle, purges, Siberia, Soviet bureaucracy, Stalin, USSR

Review: Zuleikha, by Guzel Yakhina
Oneworld, 2019. 482 pp. $27

Zuleikha Valieva lives an oppressed existence. It’s not because she lives in a village near Kazan, USSR, 1930, and the Soviet regime crushes her, though it’s about to. Rather, her husband, Murtaza, gives her nothing except hard blows and harder words, using her as beast of burden and sex object and haranguing her every move — that is, when he bothers to notice. Murtaza’s mother is even worse. She promises that the fates will punish Zuleikha, who’s a weakling, good for nothing — hasn’t she given birth only to daughters, all four of whom have died in infancy? — while Murtaza, like Mama, is strong, a born survivor.

But prophecy isn’t her chief talent, for the Soviet administration has decided that kulaks — landowning peasants, like the Valievs — are enemies of the state. And when soldiers come for their grain, livestock, and butter to feed the city populace, Murtaza fights back and dies for it.

Seizure of grain from kulaks, Kuban, Soviet Union, 1933. Photo credited to U. Druzhelubov (courtesy Proletarskoe Foto via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Good riddance, you think. But Zuleikha has believed every harsh word ever spoken to her and figures that Allah has marked her for punishment. Scared to death of what will happen next, she doesn’t understand why she must leave her village to go someplace far away; she, like many other kulaks and other “undesirables,” are being exiled, though no one will say where they’re headed. But what Zuleikha and her companions don’t realize is that they’ve just been handed a ticket to freedom. The rest of the novel shows how that happens, to what degree, and how much happiness, if any, they derive from living at the ends of the earth.

Aside from her ability to work her fingers to the bone, because that’s what life demands, Zuleikha has a fatalistic outlook that will stand her in good stead:

Death is everywhere. Zuleikha grasped that back in her childhood. Tremblingly soft chicks covered in the downiest sunny yellow fluff, curly-haired lambs scented with hay and warm milk, the first spring moths, and rosy apples filled with heavy sugary juice — all of them carried within themselves the germ of future dying. All it took was for something to happen — sometimes this was obvious, though sometimes it was accidental, fleeting, and not at all noticeable to the eye — and then the beating of life would stop within the living, ceding its place to disintegration and decay.… The fate of her own children was confirmation of that, too.

Other notable characters include a demented doctor who’s somehow a capable clinician; the camp lickspittle, a truly despicable sort who always bobs up like a cork, no matter who pushes him down; and a couple members of the intelligentsia, city slickers who’ve seen Paris, not just Leningrad or Moscow. The camp commandant, who killed Murtaza and has a thing for Zuleikha’s green eyes, comes to feel for his charges, though he can’t say so or even let himself think it. For all these, banishment to Siberia spares them from worse punishment, for the camp is a backwater, where purges don’t reach.

You just know that these people, had they remained where they were, would have been swept up by the secret police, even—especially—the commandant. For the longest time, he resents his posting, in his pride mistakenly thinking that the bureaucracy has shunted him aside, after all his many accomplishments. The political message comes through loud and clear, though Yakhina never spells it out: Here’s a cross-section of people who, for better and worse, built the Soviet state, receiving no thanks for their pains and, more often, a whip across the face.

Zuleikha has a touch of the fairytale—witness the demented doctor who remembers a remarkable amount of his training—yet reality takes front and center. In fact, when the pain of what he experiences penetrates his consciousness, he has the persistent fantasy that he’s living inside an eggshell, which shields him from the suffering all around and allows him to exist. So even when Yakhina surrenders to gauzy fantasies, she tries to twist them, make them her own.

You won’t recognize Solzhenitsyn’s gulag in her Siberian camp, though many exiles die from the harsh atmosphere and poor food. She’s more interested in the survivors, who find skills or character traits they didn’t know they had. In this, Zuleikha is Exhibit A. Her acquisition of a spine is a marvelous transformation to behold, and Yakhina’s careful not to let her consummate masochist turn into a different person altogether. Nevertheless, at times I wonder whether our heroine would be able to achieve what her creator intends, even less that Zuleikha feels drawn to the commandant, who killed her husband, after all — though, to be fair, her sense of attraction causes her guilt.

Overall, however, Zuleikha is an excellent novel, a first novel, surprisingly, full of rich, evocative prose, sharp political commentary, and a story cast against type. I recommend it.

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

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