The People's Act of Love by James Meek

With The People's Act of Love, James Meek has written a rather unlikely novel. It is not merely that this Siberian epic comes from the pen of a British author. Meek, after all, worked as a journalist in Russia for nearly a decade. Nor is it the obscure historical nature of the book, set during the Russian Civil War and drawing its cast from the remnants of the Czar's army, the Bolshevik party, the infamous Czech Legion, and a fanatical Russian religious sect. What is so improbable is that this British author has taken these elements, conjured from them a tale of mystery featuring acts of castration and cannibalism, and nearly succeeded in the effort.

The novel opens with the origins of Kyrill Ivanovich Samarin, a young Russian orphan raised by his uncle at the end of the 19th century. At age 12, the boy asks to be called simply "Samarin," after his uncle refuses his request to change his patronymic. Like his uncle, Samarin steers clear of the turbulent politics of the time, until becoming entangled by Katya, a fellow university student. It is now 1910, the empire is teetering, and Samarin learns that much to his chagrin, Katya is involved with a violent revolutionary movement. Despite his efforts to dissuade her, she is arrested and charged with "conspiring to commit an act of terrorism."

This cryptic beginning is rendered even more abstruse by the chapters that follow. The story suddenly shifts nine years forward, and we find a man meandering along a river toward a railway in rural Siberia. This silent scene is interrupted by a train whistle. As he rounds the river bend and sees the rail bridge, he pulls a package from his coat and drops it into the river. The train appears on the bridge, the man observes that one of its wagons is "rocking from side to side," and a phantasmagorical scene of destruction follows:

The door of the wagon shot open and a man in army breeches and a white shirt was in the doorway, with his back to the outside, holding on with one hand and trying to catch the bridle of a horse with the other. The horse was rearing up and flailing at the man with its forelegs. There were more horses behind, their heads lunging madly towards the light. The man fell from the wagon as it rocked towards the river and toppled over the rail. He fell fifty metres into rocky shallows. His limbs worked as if he was trying at the same time to fly, to land feet first, and to brace himself for the moment of impact. His eyes were open and so was his mouth but he did not scream. His cheeks were stretched back and he hit the water belly down. The water lifted white skirts high around him and when they came down again the man was not moving, beached on gravel, lapped by quiet eddies at the river's edge.

The horses, five of them, tumbled out of the wagon after the man. They were caught between the moving train and the low rusted guardrail of the bridge. One fell off the edge of the bridge immediately, landing on the edge of the river close to the fallen man with a crack on the water like a mine going off. The others fought for space on the bridge parapet. One stocky chestnut got dragged forward by a wagon, her harness caught by a projecting hook, and was hauled trotting and skipping and struggling against the mouth of the tunnel at the far end of the bridge, where her neck was broken.

Further grisliness follows, and if this violence is too shocking then this is certainly not the book for you. There are scenes of warfare, murder, and mutilation throughout the book, though it is important to note that Meek does not abuse his narrative license. The violence serves a purpose, and while graphic is not gratuitous, even if it seems so at the time. This is a novel of horrors but it is not a horror novel. Indeed the violence most upsetting is not necessarily the most extreme, but the most mysterious. Consider the riverside observer's reaction to the horrifying scene he has just witnessed:

He went over to the soldier and picked up his right hand. He looked back upriver the way he had come, placed the soldier's wrist on a stone washed by a thin stream of water and cut off his hand, sawing through the ligaments and parting the joints be pressure rather than the sharpness of the blade. Blood darkened the stone, clouded out into the waters and swirled away into the current.

The man let the soldier's arm fall into the river, took the severed hand and ran into the woods. He walked for a mile away from the river and dug a hole with his hands through the mud and leafmould and earth. He buried the hand and covered it up. He returned to the river, cleaned his hands and began to climb the rocks up to the railway tunnel.

Hopefully everyone shares my initial response to this scene: what the hell is going on? Indeed the mysteries of this chapter resurface throughout the text, some remaining unsolved until the closing chapters, some remaining unresolved completely. We learn shortly that this man is Samarin, quite distant in time, space and mind from the student portrayed in the opening chapter, but the same man nevertheless. He soon encounters another of the story's main characters (and enigmas), Balashov, a pious but evasive man who claims to be the local town's barber and is horrified by the animals' deaths. While Balashov is distracted, Samarin rummages through the bizarre contents of Balashov's bag, stealing a bottle of liquor and a woman's photograph, leaving behind the surgical tools and bloody cloth. They then walk together toward the local town, Yazyk, where the remainder of the book is set.

What follows is an often unexpected, often implausible story of the intersection in this small town between a band of Czech legionnaires, led by the megalomaniacal Matsulov and his distrusted lieutenant Mutz, the disturbing religious sect led by Balashov, and the young widow Anna Petrovna, whose photo Samarin removed from Balashov's bag. Through the memories (real or imagined) of these characters, Meek takes us as far as a battlefield of World War I and an arctic Russian prison camp. At the center of the ongoing enigma is the interloping Samarin; he is detained by the Czechs after a shaman they'd imprisoned dies the same night Samarin arrived in town:

As Samarin told his story, making his careful rounds of the listeners, Anna wondered at how alive and guileless his pleading eyes seemed against the ugliness of the events he described. She became aware that she had already decided he was innocent, and wouldn't change her mind; innocent, that is, of what Mutz was trying to chip out of him. She was surprised that she had reached a judgment so quickly, and realised there was nothing so convincing as a man who could feel all the richness of the world - its worst, so presumably, if it could happen, its best as well - without losing his soul to any one part of it, and becoming attached to that part.

While Meek has clearly done tremendous research into historical elements, the presentation of this knowledge is less skilled. The appearance of the Bolsheviks is clumsily handled, as they act more like comic automatons than misguided revolutionaries. And those not versed in Russian history may feel burdened by an additional layer of mystery, as some of the dialogue and plotting assumes a familiarity with the Russian Revolution and its aftermath.

Meek successfully evokes an impenetrable sense of foreboding that drives the narrative through to its conclusion, overcoming the frustration of the book's perplexing early chapters. Whether he puts this ominous mood to satisfying effect is a different question. But though the story is sometimes inscrutable, it is always interesting. Meek has collected the elements of a great novel; he just fell a bit short of putting them all together.