Orchestra
This is a wonderful and a frustrating book. In part it is a rattling good old-fashioned thriller, such as Fredrick Forsyth might have written 50 years ago, or rather two thrillers intercut with each other. One is set at an American airbase in the Ukraine in 1944 (there really was one!) and concerns a Russian interpreter who tries to defect in her boyfriend’s bomber. The second concerns the shooting down of Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983 when it strayed into Soviet airspace, the fictional connection being that one of the interceptors was the interpreter’s half-American son. Both are triumphs of controlled tension, particularly the latter.
But the book is far too long. The reader can skip the numerous digressions on politics, philosophy, psychology and air traffic control – very Russian and quite entertaining – but the climax comes about 200 pages before the end, and the rest of the book is largely made up of not-so-interesting studies from the narrator’s case-book. The narrator in a Russian army doctor. A long book which would have been brilliant at less than half the length.
