The People's Act of Love

Book Review

James Meek

The People's Act of Love is a breathtaking literary achievement, and was the TurboBookSnob's pick for the winner of the Booker Prize in 2005. Set in Siberia in 1919, it can best be described with 4 “c's” – Communism, castration, Czech soldiers, and cannibalism.

The small town of Yazyk is populated by two diverse groups – a strange Christian sect led by a man named Balashov, and a group of Czech soldiers who have been marooned there and are struggling to hold onto their control of the small Siberian village.

Samarin, a young former student who has escaped from a Russian prison, wanders into Yazyk, weak and broken, and on the run from a mysterious man called the Mohican, who Samarin insists is tracking him with murderous intentions. Soon after Samarin's arrival in town, the local shaman is murdered, and Samarin becomes the likely suspect. The beautiful Anna Petrovna falls in love with the enigmatic Samarin, and, believing him to be innocent, offers herself as bail in exchange for his freedom.

To reveal any more of this exquisitely plotted story would be a disservice to the novel's potential readers. This is a grand novel, worthy of the best in Russian literature. The characters are expertly developed, the plot is daring and horrifying. Meek's descriptions of Siberia are coldly gorgeous, and the originality of his story beckons the reader deeper and deeper into the frozen tundra of the tale.

“'Brothers and sisters, Christ that you are,' said the eagle. ‘I have flown to a high place, in an emerald aeroplane, to the eyes of God. Angels dressed me in a coat of leather, white as snow, and diamond pilot's goggles, and a leather helmet, like pilots wear, only white. I flew for many hours through the darkness until I could see, far away, the great, bright eyes of God burning, like two Londons in the night. As I grew closer I could see the million electric lamps of heaven, millions upon millions of shining lights, and the sound of angels singing from a hundred thousand gramophones. God's words pass to earth through telephone wires as thin as spiders' silk, my friends, as numerous as all the hairs on all the heads in Russia , and the angels most favoured of the Lord drive golden cars, with tyres of pearl, and horns of silver. I flew my emerald aeroplane across the face of God, and far below, on a green hill, by a river of electricity, I saw Jesus Christ Our Saviour talking to our Christ, our angel, our brother Balashov. I see him returning now, brothers and sisters, I see Gleb Alexeyevich returning from heaven, with his news, with his messages from God. He is coming back! He is here.”

“The great thieves think of themselves as a people apart, like aristocrats, living and breathing honour, obsessed with fashion, their own fashion and nobody else's. They see the non-thieves as a kind of game animal whose only honour is to be hunted by thieves. They divide women into five kinds. Their mothers; grandmothers; child-bearers, concubines; and whores. They're vain, brave, pitiless and sentimental. They love to spend the money they steal on roses, perfume and gold for women they don't know. They'll bet everything they have on anything they can, their lives on which icicle'll drop first. Their clothes are worth more than their houses, they hate progress, they think the world was always the way it is, and should stay that way. They'd rather die than swallow an insult. I learned this in the White Garden . I thought the Mohican was one of these. I was wrong.

‘He was a thief, and they honoured him for that. He'd robbed a gold barge, and killed soldiers. He was handy with a gun and a knife. There was a story that he'd broken out of jail in Bukhara and killed all the guards, every one, and a story that he'd dynamited the home of a businessman in Taganrog , burying the whole family, and they even said he'd done a bank in Alaska and crossed to Chutotka with an Eskimo dog team. He was more dangerous than the other thieves because he didn't have their sentimentality and their longing for a court to flatter them. He felt the human passions. No, he didn't feel them. He handled them. He felt their quality and sniffed them and tasted them and rubbed them against his cheek, but they didn't lodge in him. He was like someone who could feel the agony of poison but couldn't be killed by it no matter how much he drank. So he could feel pity flood through his body watching a child looking at home out of the window of a house he had wired with explosive, and still close the circuit, because the pity left no mark as it passed through. What was most terrible about him was his certainty. For such a man, you'd think, life would be a game. When there's nothing to strive for, no irresistible human desires, you play. He wasn't playing. With him, it was like the difference between writing and drawing. We live our lives like writing. The pen moves over the paper in regular lines. The past is written and can be read, the future is blank, and the pen must stay in the word that is being written now. The Mohican lives like drawing. He draws one stroke after the other, but the strokes can be anywhere on the paper. When you watch, the strokes look disjointed and meaningless, but in his mind he sees the whole picture, complete. Complete until his death. He's just filling it in. That's what you are to the Mohican. A stroke in his picture. You could be on the edge or in the middle, you could be a cut throat or a tiny detail or a single look that fills the whole foreground. Only he knows, but he does know. He knows his own order of things.”