Robert Harris is the author of the very successful and previously reviewed Fatherland, the kind of novel I usually do not read because it relies on the “what if” kind of assumptions that I find trite and silly. But that novel worked quite well. It assumed that Hitler had won the war, that he had successfully hidden the details of the Holocaust, and that he was about to begin friendly relations with the United States under president Kennedy. The a Berlin detective stumbles across evidence of the killing of the Jews and the peace talks threaten to unravel bringing the war of officialdom down on the detective. It was a surprisingly good read.Harris adopts a similar conceit in Archangel. Fluke (interesting story behind the name) Kelso is a Sovietologist who stumbles into a drunken meeting with Papu Rapava, a former NKVD guard who claims he had been present at Stalin’s death and had helped Beria (a Politburo member and KGB chief) find and hide a a secret black notebook that was purported to contain Stalin’s diary. Rapava is murdered before Kelso can obtain all the details and the location of the diary that would represent, for Kelso, the find of a lifetime. He tracks down Rapava’s daughter, a hooker whom he persuades to help him find the diary. Unfortunately there are several pages missing, but they have enough information to try to locate a young girl that Stalin had brought from her village to play with. He and an American reporter who had stumbled on Kelso’s knowledge of the diary and who seems to know more about his satellite telephone equipment than the country he reports on, set off for Archangel in the Soviet north during the winter to find the girl and interview her in order to verify the information in the diary and collect more details about Stalin.
There are many who would stop them, however, and a top notch thriller results as Kelso makes a momentous discovery in Archangel.
Harris’s understanding of modern Russia, if accurate, is chilling. The book is filled with little details (Stalin had two webbed toes on his left foot) that give it a strong sense of reality. Harris must have spent considerable time there: ”At five past 10, the door opened, '' Kelso describes a nightclub, ''A yellow light, the silhouettes of the girls, the steamy glow of their perfumed breath. . . . And from the cars now came the serious money. You could tell the seriousness not just by the weight of the coats and the jewelry but by the way their owners carried themselves, straight to the head of the line, and by the amount of protection they left hanging around at the door. Clearly, the only guns allowed on the premises belonged to the management.''
Filled with corruption and violence, the country still reveres Stalin, even though through Kelso, Harris reveals Stalin to be a greater evil than Hitler during the twentieth century, if one counts the number of people each had killed. The Cold War is over, but Russia seems to be slipping into its own kind of darkness and the country that provided the background for so many first-rate spy stories continues to invoke a sense of noir and darkness that makes for a gripping read.
