Michael Dirda
In this war story, soldiers change sides the way some people change hats.

By Michael Dirda
Sunday, February 26, 2006

THE PEOPLE'S ACT OF LOVE

A Novel

By James Meek

Canongate. 391 pp. $24

Think of your favorite Russian novel. Is it one of Dostoevsky's nightmarish depictions of existential torment? Or an evocation of love's cross-currents during a week in the country, something in the wistful mode of Turgenev or Chekhov? Perhaps you prefer the sweep of Doctor Zhivago , or the achingly human characters of Anna Karenina , or maybe the romantic fatedness of Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time , or even the grim testimony of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ? No matter where you look in classic Russian fiction, you're almost sure to find spiritual anguish, gallows humor and fanaticism. There's nothing light-hearted or namby-pamby about the Slavic outlook on life. How could there be when the only fundamental question is the life or death of the soul, and how we must finally choose one or the other?

At times James Meek's The People's Act of Love will remind you of all the books I've just mentioned, but it is no less original and breathtaking for that. Meek is an English journalist who has spent considerable time in Russia, and he has clearly immersed himself in its culture, literature and history, especially that of the period just before and after the Bolshevik Revolution. More important, he possesses a talent for storytelling that fully justifies the echo of Gabriel García Márquez in his novel's first sentence:

"When Kyrill Ivanovich Samarin was twelve, years before he would catch, among the scent of textbooks and cologne in a girl's satchel, the distinct odour of dynamite, he demanded that his uncle let him change his second name." From here Meek goes on to evoke the douceur de vivre among the bourgeoisie in those final summer days before the Revolution, while also establishing the themes and twists that power his main story. Only later are you likely to understand the full implications of this description of the young hero, Samarin:

"He had a way of devoting attention absolutely to one woman, which not only pleased her during their conversation, but left her with the feeling afterwards that the time they'd spent -- no matter how brief, and usually it was brief -- was time offered to her from a precious store, time which could and should have been used by Samarin to continue a great task. The fact that nobody knew what this great task was only intensified the feeling. Besides, he dressed well, he stood to inherit a large estate, he was clever, and everything about him, his wit, his strength, even his looks -- he was tall, a little gaunt, with thick collar-length brown hair and eyes that shifted between serene remoteness and a sudden sharp focus -- suggested a man holding himself back from revealing his full self out of consideration for the less gifted around him."

During this first chapter, really a kind of overture, Samarin falls in love with the beautiful Katya, who has joined a revolutionary cell, and he tries to persuade her of the danger she is in. To no avail. Chapter Two opens nine years later, in 1919 Siberia, as a half-starved convict stumbles alone toward a railroad bridge. When he hears a train approaching, he tosses a seemingly precious package into the river below. Meek now describes, in slow motion, a harrowing, almost Homeric scene. As the train rumbles by, a soldier on board opens the door of a stock car and tries to catch the bridle of a horse that is rearing and flailing inside the wagon. The man is knocked from the train and falls 50 meters into the rocky shallows below.

"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.

"The three surviving horses tried to shuffle to safety between the train and the rail. There was space for them to move in single file, and barely that, but one of the three, a big skinny coal black horse, was trying to go in the opposite direction to the others. It reared up and its feet came down on the horse blocking its way, a bay. The black one got its balance back and reared again. The bay pushed forward and the black one ended up on top, its legs hung over the neck of the other.

"While the bay and the black were locked together, like punch drunk boxers, the train must have given the third horse, a white stallion, a shove, or it had gone mad, because it charged the guard rail and dived head first over the edge into the river. It was roped together with the bay and the bay was snatched out from underneath the black horse and went down after. Bay and white flew down, so unlike Pegasus, graceless in the air, their limbs frozen, and smacked thunderously into the skin of water over river pebbles."

These horses -- one can feel their gut-wrenching panic, almost see the white horror in their eyes -- call to mind their many frenzied predecessors in Western art: Maddened horses, like those in Picasso's "Guernica," are the very symbol of war's terror and devastation. From this magnificent scene until his heart-pounding final chapters, Meek never lets the narrative tension slacken. As Samarin -- for it is he -- shambles toward the village of Yazyk, the reader enters with him into a realm of madness, violence and death, where almost everyone has something to hide. Something terrible.

Why are there almost no children in Yazyk? Why is the beautiful Anna Petrovna living here alone with her young son? What happened to her passionate young husband, a hussar officer of commanding skill with horse and sword, as he fought on the western front? What does the drunken, chained-up shaman see in his apocalyptic visions? Why does the mercenary-like Czechoslovak Legion occupy the town even though the war is over? Who is this mysterious Mohican, this murderous anarchist relentlessly on the trail of Samarin? What, too, is the meaning of the strange "spinning" that accompanies the ecstatic religious ceremonies of the townspeople? And how long until the Red Army finally attacks under orders to wipe out the Czechoslovak Legion to the last man?

All Meek's characters spring to vivid life, whether the shaman's albino apprentice or the village headman Balashov, who is all gentleness despite the mysterious surgical instruments he carries in his knapsack. The cruel, sensual and oddly courtly commander of the Czechs, the 24-year-old Matula, possesses a Caligula-like depravity, from "the druggy charm of the captain's lips" to "the carcass soul in his eyes." Here he addresses his soldiers, now down to a hundred or so:

" 'Men,' said Matula, 'Comrades. Friends. We have fought together for five years. We have fought for the Emperor of the Austrians against the Emperor of the Russians. We have fought for the Emperor of the Russians against the Emperor of the Austrians. We have fought for the White Terror of the monarchists against the Red Terror of the Bolsheviks. We have fought with Socialist Revolutionaries and Cossacks against Cossacks and Socialist Revolutionaries. I can say to you, with pride, that not once have we compromised our ideals."

Matula's lieutenant Mutz -- reminiscent of Isaac Babel in that writer's Red Cavalry stories -- is kind, sensitive, deeply in love with Anna Petrovna and the novel's chief voice of reason. But he is surrounded by paranoia and insanity. When Mutz interrupts Samarin's testimony during his "trial," he himself is broken off by the would-be emperor of Siberia, still upset from the mysterious death of his horses and flying high on cocaine: " 'Mutz, Mutz, Mutz,' said Matula, with his free hand over his eyes. He massaged the bridge of his nose and his pistol hand twitched. 'Let the man tell his story. Don't interrupt again. My spirits are very turbulent now." Samarin's story, we learn, is one of unrelieved horror -- of starvation in an Arctic prison camp, of escape, of murder and possible cannibalism.

But there are other horrors besides these. Extremism, after all, is all too often the Russian way -- no compromises, no half-way measures, no holding back. This makes The People's Act of Love an altogether soul-shaking novel, tightly mixing pathos and grandeur, whether in the scene of the horses at the bridge, or of Anna's husband lost in the hallucinatory confusion of battle, in Samarin's cold determination to survive at all cost, or a young woman's ravenous hunger for love and fulfillment, and finally even in an angelic soul's decision to redeem his life through damnation. The principal action takes place over three days, but its scope is at once epic, even melodramatic, and deeply personal. For the Red Army will come to Yazyk, even as a heartless assassin finally appears, out of the fog of war, carrying a child in his arms, like Lear bearing the dead Cordelia.

Meek has created a tremendously impressive work of art, at once serious, upsetting and astonishingly moving. I'm sorry that I can't forthrightly discuss some of his carefully timed revelations, and so -- in two senses -- can't say enough about his book. It contains wonderfully tender passages -- a young couple's honeymoon, a criminal sweetly joshing a little boy -- and others of a primitive grisliness. Above all, it reminds us that true believers, in anything, nearly always end up sacrificing their humanity for abstractions.

The People's Act of Love also relieves, or sometimes augments, its ferocity through Russian-style gallows humor. Near the end, Mutz -- an old soldier at 30 -- is about to cross a street being strifed with rifle and cannon fire in a town of warring camps. As he goes, he turns to his little company of men, and says, "Lieutenant Dezort, Sergeant Nekovar, Private Broucek, please defend the crossroads while I'm away. Don't shoot at our friends unless it's really necessary." Ah, yes. But in a time of apocalyptic violence, how do you know your friends from your enemies? And besides, does it really matter? Sometimes innocent blood must flow to create heaven on Earth. Mustn't it? ·

Michael Dirda is a columnist for Book World. His e-mail address is mdirda@gmail.com, and his online discussion of books takes place each Wednesday at 2 p.m. on washingtonpost.com.