The serial killer tale is, by now, a weary veteran of the thriller genre. Its ubiquitous presence in the Crime section of any bookstore is testimony to the fact that writers , aspiring or established, feel compelled to leave their mark in this sub-genre. For good reason, because, told even moderately well, tales of diabolically vicious sociopaths, marching to the beat of their own twisted psyches and leaving behind a trail of dead bodies makes for page-turning stuff.
The downside to the proliferation of such tales is that, read enough of them, and you can practically etch your own template for its plot machinations: First or third person investigative narrative interspersed with the killer’s point of view, whose identity and motives are obfuscated through a generous smattering of red herrings as the body count steadily stacks up via ritualistic slayings, before a gory, twist-laden denouement unravels the mystery, unmasks the killer and ties up loose ends with a bloody bow.
Tom Rob Smith’s debut, Child 44, while clutching at some of the tropes of the serial thriller, nevertheless manages to cut loose of some of the genre’s restrictive trappings, by anchoring its events at a particular point and time in history, shrouding it in the claustrophobic confines of Stalinist Russia circa 1953.
Starting in 1933, in the famine-stricken Ukraine village of Chervoy “where grown men chewed clods of earth in the hope of finding ants or insect eggs, where children picked through horseshit in the hope of finding undigested husks of grain and women fought over the ownership of bones”, then racing forward twenty years to 1953, when Stalin’s iron grip on Soviet life is at it’s tightest, Child 44 is a gripping thriller of the first order.
The discovery of a young boy’s body on train tracks in Moscow , brings Leo Stepanovich Demidov , investigating officer of MGB, the State Security force, to the house of the boy’s family, who are convinced he was murdered. Far from investigating their suspicions, Leo is there to convince them that their son’s death was accidental.
For to claim otherwise is to acknowledge a rend in society’s perfect fabric, an upset to the natural, precise order of things, for such crimes simply do not take place in Stalin’s Soviet.
Stalin’s aphorism, “Trust But Check”, interpreted as “Check On Those We Trust” rebounds cruelly on Leo when he is asked to denounce his wife Raisa as a Capitalist sympathiser. Refusing, he and Raisa are exiled to a town deep in the Ural mountains. There Leo discovers a similar pattern of child killings like the one he helped cover up in Moscow.
Leo and Raisa’s race to find the killer is white-knuckle reading, because it isn’t merely the lack of resources or access to investigative tools that hamper them, but an entire state that refuses to believe the killings are connected.
Leo’s clandestine investigation of the killings, painstakingly piecing together evidence, clues and timelines runs parallel to the relentless grind of the State machinery to threaten, coerce, beat and torture confessions out of drunks, vagrants, homosexuals and the mentally handicapped. Murder is an aberration, therefore, it’s perpetrator would also be one, goes the official reasoning.
For in Stalin’s State Security Force, the investigator’s creed was “to scratch away at innocence until guilt was uncovered. If no guilt was uncovered, they hadn’t scratched deep enough.” Leo, growing increasingly despondent realizes “the killer would continue to kill, concealed not by any masterful brilliance but by his country’s refusal to admit that such a man even existed, wrapping him in perfect immunity.”
Perhaps it’s Smith’s masterful depiction of Soviet life under a tyrannical State, not to mention a fascinating portrait of Leo and Raisa’s often ambiguous relationship, that eventually eclipses the actual serial killer plot, which in the last 100 pages, accelerates into the requisite thrills, spills, hunts, chases and climactic confrontation that this genre demands.
Cloaked in a miasma of oppressive brutality, Child 44 is an absolute scorcher of a thriller, packing a stunning whallop that makes it shine at the quality end of a crowded field.
And that’s saying something.
The downside to the proliferation of such tales is that, read enough of them, and you can practically etch your own template for its plot machinations: First or third person investigative narrative interspersed with the killer’s point of view, whose identity and motives are obfuscated through a generous smattering of red herrings as the body count steadily stacks up via ritualistic slayings, before a gory, twist-laden denouement unravels the mystery, unmasks the killer and ties up loose ends with a bloody bow.
Tom Rob Smith’s debut, Child 44, while clutching at some of the tropes of the serial thriller, nevertheless manages to cut loose of some of the genre’s restrictive trappings, by anchoring its events at a particular point and time in history, shrouding it in the claustrophobic confines of Stalinist Russia circa 1953.
Starting in 1933, in the famine-stricken Ukraine village of Chervoy “where grown men chewed clods of earth in the hope of finding ants or insect eggs, where children picked through horseshit in the hope of finding undigested husks of grain and women fought over the ownership of bones”, then racing forward twenty years to 1953, when Stalin’s iron grip on Soviet life is at it’s tightest, Child 44 is a gripping thriller of the first order.
The discovery of a young boy’s body on train tracks in Moscow , brings Leo Stepanovich Demidov , investigating officer of MGB, the State Security force, to the house of the boy’s family, who are convinced he was murdered. Far from investigating their suspicions, Leo is there to convince them that their son’s death was accidental.
For to claim otherwise is to acknowledge a rend in society’s perfect fabric, an upset to the natural, precise order of things, for such crimes simply do not take place in Stalin’s Soviet.
Stalin’s aphorism, “Trust But Check”, interpreted as “Check On Those We Trust” rebounds cruelly on Leo when he is asked to denounce his wife Raisa as a Capitalist sympathiser. Refusing, he and Raisa are exiled to a town deep in the Ural mountains. There Leo discovers a similar pattern of child killings like the one he helped cover up in Moscow.
Leo and Raisa’s race to find the killer is white-knuckle reading, because it isn’t merely the lack of resources or access to investigative tools that hamper them, but an entire state that refuses to believe the killings are connected.
Leo’s clandestine investigation of the killings, painstakingly piecing together evidence, clues and timelines runs parallel to the relentless grind of the State machinery to threaten, coerce, beat and torture confessions out of drunks, vagrants, homosexuals and the mentally handicapped. Murder is an aberration, therefore, it’s perpetrator would also be one, goes the official reasoning.
For in Stalin’s State Security Force, the investigator’s creed was “to scratch away at innocence until guilt was uncovered. If no guilt was uncovered, they hadn’t scratched deep enough.” Leo, growing increasingly despondent realizes “the killer would continue to kill, concealed not by any masterful brilliance but by his country’s refusal to admit that such a man even existed, wrapping him in perfect immunity.”
Perhaps it’s Smith’s masterful depiction of Soviet life under a tyrannical State, not to mention a fascinating portrait of Leo and Raisa’s often ambiguous relationship, that eventually eclipses the actual serial killer plot, which in the last 100 pages, accelerates into the requisite thrills, spills, hunts, chases and climactic confrontation that this genre demands.
Cloaked in a miasma of oppressive brutality, Child 44 is an absolute scorcher of a thriller, packing a stunning whallop that makes it shine at the quality end of a crowded field.
And that’s saying something.
A slightly edited version is on StarOnLine:
http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2009/1/9/lifebookshelf/2524048&sec=lifebookshelf
