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DEADLY HUNT IN STALIN'S SHADOW

The tale of a disgraced policeman in Stalinist Russia

Friday March 28,2008

By Nick Ryan

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TO HAVE your book optioned for a film is not unusual. To have your first novel chosen is slightly more so.

But to have your first novel, written when you are barely 30 years of age, picked by Gladiator director Ridley Scott. . .
well, that does make people stand up and take notice.

Child 44 caused rare ripples of excitement when it was unveiled as an unpublished manuscript at the London Book Fair.

The tale of a disgraced secret policeman in Stalinist Russia, it has the twists and turns of a Tom Clancy thriller but a more subtle undertone too: the hero Leo Demidov is on a journey of self-discovery to "save" himself and the lives of others.

So a tale of redemption but deliciously laced with a gritty, grimy undercurrent of repression and harsh Soviet reality.

It is an accomplished, smoothly-told tale, beginning with Leo's decision not to prosecute the case of a murdered boy, the son of a fellow officer. To do so would upset the balance and order of things, to call into question the efficiency of the state security apparatus.

This is the world of the MGB, the precursor to the KGB, where everyone is a suspect and thousands are being arrested, tortured or sentenced every month. Many just disappear.

There are perfect crime and employment figures, the pages of Pravda are filled with dull news of ever-increasing production and Soviet success. Only Leo's experiences show that the reality is very different.

The "system" cannot accept faults; it cannot accurately investigate because it is not interested in the victim or the perpetrator, only in punishing the "guilty", who are often innocent. Once your name is on a list, you will confess.

Leo accepts this fact, blunting himself to the beatings, arrests and terror his work causes. Only when he is asked to carry out the ultimate test of loyalty, to denounce his wife and thereby secure his future, is his world called into question.

Banished to the outer fringes of the Soviet Union, Leo discovers the child killer is at work again. Here begins an almost messianic downward spiral to catch the murderer despite the mass arrests of innocents: the retarded, downand-outs and homosexuals blamed by everyone else.

In doing so, Leo not only risks his own life but that of his wife too: a drama and relationship played out with a maturity belying Smith's own young age.

CHILD 44
By Tom Rob Smith Simon & Schuster, £12.99