Chilling novel resonates in China
Print Edition
THE story opens on a winter night when two hungry children are on the hunt for a fat cat during the big famine in Ukraine in 1933. Deep in the woods, the two brothers were separated. A big blow hit Pavel on the head. He falls prey to a man who is on the hunt as well, but not for the cat...
Fate has its ways. Twenty years later, when the two brothers reunite, Pavel has become Leo Demidov, a secret police agent in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Andrei has taken on Pavel’s name, and has murdered at least 44 children who were of the same age as he was when Pavel left him in the woods.
While Pavel spent his whole life trying to forget the past, Andrei concentrated his life on bringing Pavel back home, — even if it meant killing innocent children in the winter months so that he could leave tracks through the snow.
Could you execute your own sibling? Would you betray your spouse to save yourself or your parents? Could you torture, or endure it? These are just a few of the dark choices Leo must face in the bone-chilling thriller “Child 44” by Tom Rob Smith.
“It’s easy in most of today’s societies to be a good person because, fundamentally, the societies are good; we’re liberal, we’re tolerant, we’re about people achieving what they want to achieve in a sweeping sense,” Smith said at a recent book talk at M on the Bund.
“But when your society is asking these terrible things of you, how easy is it to buck it? How easy is it to shrug that off, and how easy do you get caught up in that?”
Born in 1979 to a Swedish mother and an English father, Smith was raised in London where he lives today. After graduating from Cambridge University in 2001, he completed his studies in Italy, where he studied creative writing for a year. After these studies, he worked as a scriptwriter.
His first novel, “Child 44,” about a series of child murders in Stalinist Russia, appeared in early 2008 and has since been translated into 17 languages.
The Chinese translation of his books came out in 2012 when Smith came to China for the first time in promotion of the “Child 44” trilogy that includes the sequels — “The Secret Speech” and “Agent 6.”
Set in the fear and repression of the Soviet society under Joseph Stalin, Leo Demidov’s personal hell has truly been paved with the best of intentions.
The idealist war hero and rising star within Stalin’s State Security force has ordered the execution of thousands of his countrymen, or worse, dispatched them to the infamous gulags, believing “enemies” of the country were doubters of the society.
But when he obediently dismisses the brutal 1953 murder and evisceration of a colleague’s young son as nothing more than an accident, the narrow path of lies on which his career is founded suddenly veers into a nightmarish landscape of his own worst fears.
For Chinese readers who remember the 50s and 60s, the horrors come not from a few uncomfortable scenes of violence and torture in the book, but the exposure of the agonizing paranoia of an era when sons turned against their fathers, wives denounced their husbands, and friends became aliens; when love itself was a political lesson and personal choice be tailored to the country’s needs; when casual conversations were rare and tendency to speak one’s mind could cost you your life.
“This is an idealism that has gone wrong,” Smith said, “Leo is someone who is fundamentally a good person. In the attempt to arrest someone who is genuinely guilty, he is then persecuted for it. It’s an interesting redemption for him, and then an endeavor to prove that he is worthy of being loved.”
Tom Rob Smith teamed up with Emilie Wang for questions and answers at M’s LitFest.
How did you get started in creative writing?
Neither of my parents has much education. They made a living by selling antiques. It seemed very unlikely that I’d take up writing as my career. But I have always loved stories and storytelling. I’ll just keep doing it as long as I am interested.
Where did you come across such a topic featuring the KGB agent?
History, actually. I was working on a screen adaptation of a short story by science fiction writer Jeff Noon when I happened upon the true-crime case of Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo. Russian books always looked intimidating, but I was not deterred. It took me six months to do research on the topic, reading everything from Robert Conquest’s “The Harvest of Sorrow” to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” to yes, even Martin Cruz Smith’s “Gorky Park.”
What’s the process of your writing?
Everyone has his own schedule. Mine is to sit up and write from 6am to 2pm every day, eight hours straight. Sometimes I will hold the story for a whole day, just to wait for the inspiration. In screenwriting, I think about set pieces a lot. And that’s something I applied when I wrote “Child 44,” to keep the story moving at the right pace so that the readers are hooked.
Did you ever get lost in your novel with your characters?
No, I am not that involved. I have heard stories about (fashion designer) Alexander McQueen, who would sew pieces of his own hair or skin in the clothes he designed. Some people think of him as a pervert, while I can perfectly understand. It’s a reflection of his elaborate storytelling, craftsmanship of the highest level. All things come at a price.
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