Archangel
By Robert Harris
Something of a surprise for me, since I’d never heard of it before. I had been hunting Harris’s first work of fiction, Fatherland, on eBay when I came upon an excellent offer: That book (used) + three others by the same author (new) for, I think, a starting bid of £2 plus postage.
I watched the item over the course of a few days, amazed that no-one had made a bid on it. It came down to the last couple of minutes still untouched, so I bid the minimum and snapped myself up a bargain.
One of my work colleagues asked me what I’d been reading lately, and I mentioned Fatherland. She asked me whether I’d tried Archangel yet. I hadn’t, she suggested I might like to read it sooner than later. I followed her advice.
The book is set in post Soviet Russia, opening with a conversation from Papu Rapava, a man so loyal to Stalin that he served time in the camps rather than reveal what happened at the time of the GenSec’s death.
By the time of this story, he’s an old man, long gone the strength that made him so proficient a bodyguard. The man interviewing is a famous historian, Christopher “Fluke” Kelso.
For the first time, Rapava reveals the sinister events behind the death of Stalin, how comrade Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, of the Commissariat for Internal Affairs, hushed everything up and stole something from the safe. (In real life, Beria boasted to Molotov that he had poisoned Stalin at a dinner they were at four days before, during which Stalin collapsed.)
The story runs from here. Kelso is determined to find out what Beria was after. He runs into problems with an ardent communist who will do nothing to help.
As is the course for these stories, there is a girl involved, this time Rapava’s daughter, now an orphan since Mamantov and his goons found out that he had been talking.
The secret leads Kelso and a journalist to Archangel. Bit by bit, the story is unravelled. A daughter of a very proud communist family was summoned to work in the Kremlin in the 1950s. She soon returned, broken and pregnant. She died and the baby was taken away. Stalin’s heir.
This is the crux of everything. Stalin has a secret son. They go out to the woods to find him.
He’s superhuman and crazy. He murdered the Norwegian couple that raised him. Kelso and the reporter are safe, because he believes them to be two messengers, a prophecy for him to carry out his destiny.
He cuts his hair and looks exactly like his father, dressed up in a pristine uniform. All he knows his communist ideology, all he has read is his father’s memoirs. And thanks to the reporter’s secretly recording things and transmitting them, the world knows what’s happening, and the thugs in pursuit of them are able to track them down from the broadcast signal.
Stalin jr tries to catch the fleeing Kelso, and ends up on the same Moscow-bound train. Mamontov and his goons, accompanied by a TV crew, are trying to intercept the train to have Stalin return to Red Square. The people, alerted by the press coverage, rejoice utterly. The master has returned.
The story ends with a gunshot, fired by Rapava’s daughter. We don’t find out who it was she shot, only that she was imagining seeing her tortured father’s body. Did she shoot the man who did it (Mamantov), or the man who interviewed him and dragged this information out of him by plying him with drink and thus condemning him to death (Kelso)?
I thought that this was a very intelligent book. I suffered at times through not being able to remember who was who, but the story is very creative and intertwines very well with real fact. Harris seems to be a master of taking real events and documented facts, and using them as threads from which to weave excellent stories.
Tags: Robert Harris