If
there’s no such thing as bad publicity, then Tom Rob Smith’s
debut novel is the early winner of the Booker Prize longlist.
More column inches, most of them negative, seem to have been written
about Child 44 than about any other longlisted title.
“A fairly well-written and well-paced thriller that is no
more than that,” said Jamie Byng of Canongate, damning with
faint praise, adding, for the avoidance of doubt, “I cannot
respect a judging committee that decides to pick a book like Child
44.” Others call it “a great page turner of a
read but not a Booker contender.” My feeling is that there
shouldn’t be such a category as “Booker contender,”
or at least not one which excludes thrillers. Patricia Highsmith
wrote ’suspense novels’ but I would rescue several
of her titles from my shelves ahead of many Booker winners. In
fact there is no such exclusion: the great Brian Moore was shortlisted
twice for his late-career thrillers, The Colour of Blood
(1987) and Lies of Silence (1990). Enough of that: is
Child 44 any good then, thriller or not?
The first thing to say, as may be clear from above,
is that I would never have picked up Child 44 if it hadn’t
been Booker longlisted. I don’t think it constitutes a spoiler
- the blurb will tell you as much - to say that the book is a
serial killer thriller (a little more than that, but it conveys
the gist), and on the few occasions I’ve tried those before,
I’ve never profited. Fred Vargas’s Seeking Whom
He May Devour and Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon
are the only ones that spring to mind, and I found them both unsatisfying,
fatally limited by their own terms of reference (whodunit? and
why did he do it? respectively).
Child 44 does have some promise, however,
with an interesting setting - Soviet Russia and Ukraine in the
1950s - and an opening scene which reaches out pretty garishly
to attract the reader but is nonetheless effective. Smith also
manages to evoke the era and setting well without getting bogged
down in detail. Leo Demidov is “an up-and-coming member
of the MGB, the state security force” who deals in the sort
of quotidian brutality in which the USSR specialised under Stalin.
Anyone who asks too many questions is an enemy of the state, and
in particular, people are reminded that crime does not exist in
the Soviet Union. Leo, for example, must tell a family whose son
was found dead on a railway line that he was not murdered as they
suspect, but died accidentally.
This, via a series of conflicts with his superiors
and colleagues, leads Leo to pursue justice for the family. (This
takes us to halfway through the book, but again, I’m not
revealing any more than the cover blurb does.)
Tom Rob Smith on
Child 44
If this seems to you to have a whiff of familiarity to it, you’d
be right. It’s the old trope of the official who goes off
on his own to investigate the murder despite being warned that
the authorities consider the case closed. This, perhaps, is not
Smith’s fault - just as it’s not his fault that his
publishers have spent a packet promoting the book, or that the
Booker judges by longlisting it have exposed the book to the scrutiny
of people who would never otherwise have read it - but a fault
of the genre.
However it’s also the case that Smith does
not seem to have made any effort to transcend the limitations
of his chosen form. Child 44 is well researched for its
time and place, but there is no interest in authenticity elsewhere,
particularly in what we might reasonably call the ‘action
sequences’, such as a pursuit under ice, escape from a Gulag
train (an especially untoothful part), and the closing chase scenes
- for this is one of those books where the last 90% of the action
takes place in the last 10% of the pages. Similarly the bibliography
cited by Smith rings hollow when he has been unable to teach the
reader anything unexpected about the USSR or about human nature:
there are no surprises, no characters subverting our expectations,
no challenges to the reader’s assumptions.
Others have said, on blogs and forums, that Child
44 is, despite its weaknesses, “a great page-turner”
or “an excellent thriller.” Never mind that, I want
to say: is it a good book? I don’t think it can be: it leaves
the reader with nothing to contribute, preferring to explain everything
as it arises, usually in unlikely reflections by the main characters
- like that explanatory description of Leo Demidov’s job
(”an up-and-coming member of the MGB, the state security
force”), which comes from Leo’s point of view, as
though he would routinely remind himself about his job and what
MGB means. Indeed point of view seems to be a closed book to Smith,
along with narrative integrity generally. He regularly switches
viewpoint in the middle of a scene, to suit what he needs to tell
the reader - almost all the exposition in the book comes from
this or from over-explanatory dialogue - and has extraordinary
blunders like the following sequence of thought attributed to
a four-year-old child:
If he ran he’d be
safe. The shot, no matter how well made, no matter how accurate,
could only travel so far through the air before it began to
lose shape, fall apart. And even if it hit, after a certain
distance they were harmless, barely worth throwing at all. If
he ran, he could finish on a high. He didn’t want his
victory overturned, tainted by a succession of quick hits from
his brother. No: run and claim success. Finish the game now.
He’d be able to enjoy the feeling until at least tomorrow
when he’d probably lose again. But that was tomorrow.
Today was victory.
Less significant solecisms pepper the text, especially
a blind spot with commas, and there are distracting formatting
problems like all the dialogue throughout being in italics (apparently
to signify words in translation: a barmy notion). But Child
44’s greatest sin is not the dialogue it does have,
but the dialogue it doesn’t: it offers no exchange between
reader and writer. This is a monologue where the reader is a mute
witness. It reminded me of multiplex blockbusters like Casino
Royale and The Bourne Ultimatum - sequences of action
pinned together by a secondary plot. The only dialogue here seemed
to be the writer asking, “Will this do?” and my wondering,
“Is that it?”
It may be that as a movie - it’s been optioned
by Ridley Scott - Child 44 will be, if not better, at
least more successful on its own terms. As mentioned before, it’s
not Tom Rob Smith’s fault that the Booker judges have chosen
this is one of the best 13 novels published in the last year.
He wrote an unpretentious thriller, which doesn’t pretend
to be anything more than a disposable time-filler. Then again,
I couldn’t see anything to justify anyone spending time
on it even on those terms. Perhaps it’s true that there’s
no such thing as bad publicity. But there’s no need to court
it quite so brazenly.
John
Self
To read more of John Self's book reviews, check
out his blog at
The Asylum.
If
there’s no such thing as bad publicity, then Tom Rob Smith’s
debut novel is the early winner of the Booker Prize longlist.
More column inches, most of them negative, seem to have been written
about Child 44 than about any other longlisted title.
“A fairly well-written and well-paced thriller that is no
more than that,” said Jamie Byng of Canongate, damning with
faint praise, adding, for the avoidance of doubt, “I cannot
respect a judging committee that decides to pick a book like Child
44.” Others call it “a great page turner of a
read but not a Booker contender.” My feeling is that there
shouldn’t be such a category as “Booker contender,”
or at least not one which excludes thrillers. Patricia Highsmith
wrote ’suspense novels’ but I would rescue several
of her titles from my shelves ahead of many Booker winners. In
fact there is no such exclusion: the great Brian Moore was shortlisted
twice for his late-career thrillers, The Colour of Blood
(1987) and Lies of Silence (1990). Enough of that: is
Child 44 any good then, thriller or not?