The Archipelago of Another Life
The novel takes the form of a story within a story, as Pavel Gartsev relates the bizarre world of the reservist Red Army soldier in the years after the end of the Second World War. It is like living in a Samuel Beckett novel of absurd but brutal existence of military life in the equally incongruous Communist regime of the Soviet Union. In the early 1950s, Gartsev’s unit is despatched to the isolated but beautiful vast taiga lands in the Far East of Siberia, where he undergoes a cruel experience in a nuclear bunker, and then is selected in a small group of five conscripts to track down an escaped prisoner from one of the camps of the Gulag. The pursuit takes on a surreal note as the convict is chased across the taiga, leading the blundering group a merry dance. The narrative has an allegorical, fairy-tale aspect, as Gartsev gradually finds a new reality and learns much about himself and his life.
Makine has published a large number of novels since 1997 that dissect the weird (and ultimately and with hindsight, unsustainable) world of the Soviet regime. This is a readable and intelligent account of the horrors of the militarised command system and how it encouraged the worst of human behaviour to make it work, yet within this, there is still an opportunity, howbeit ever so small, to transcend the horrors and find a better way of living.
