Rough Beast
By Anthony Olcott
Scribners, 243 pages, $20
Upscale thrillers, they are called in the publishing biz: All the plot elements you might expect from action-adventure, crime, mystery, but also things you might not: unusual settings, complexity of character, subtlety of observation, a prose style that sings as well as zings. William Goldman, Michael Crichton, Elmore Leonard, Tony Hillerman, James Lee Burke, James W. Hall-these are some of the writers who have elevated the crowd-pleaser into something more, often much more. Now add to the list Anthony Olcott.
Olcott, a professor of Russian Studies at Colgate University who has also taught English at Moscow State University, is represented elsewhere in the literary canon by such titles as ”The Complete Works of Boris Poplavsky.”
Here, however, is his third Ivan Duvakin novel, ”Rough Beast,” an engrossing tale of murder and intrigue in post-Party Russia, which soars on the strength of its style and substance as much as on its story.
Duvakin is a middle-aged, unassuming, unambitious Muscovite who flunked out of the Higher Party School, a decent man now in the employ of the Ministry of Oil and Gas, where he has ”settled toward the bottom of the nomenklatura jobs like a dead leaf in a pond, finally coming to rest in the muck of the cadre division.” He comes home from work one gloomy winter evening to find his apartment stripped nearly bare, his adopted daughter fled with her lowlife boyfriend, his acquisitive, upwardly mobile wife bludgeoned to a pulp by invaders unknown. He is left to file a report with a militia inspector whose bored indifference exceeds any New York cop`s, then must endure a wake with colleagues of his physician wife more interested in snapping up the antique dining table that`s been left behind than in mourning the dead.
As he fends off one of Galya`s friends who is willing to assume all the absent wife`s duties, Duvakin receives a call from the energy minister himself and learns he is to be posted to the production fields of Novii Uzen, on a godforsaken peninsula near the Caspian Sea. Production is down in Novii Uzen, the minister explains, but he suspects it`s a power play by the provincials. Duvakin`s mission is to ingratiate himself with the local populace and lend support to opponents of the mayor/oil-field chief in an upcoming election, in order to open that oil tap wide again.
In despair, disillusioned with a Moscow in social chaos (”the place had finally all caved in like the nose on a syphilitic whore”), Duvakin accepts: ”So whatever might be waiting for him in this Novii Uzen, he thought as he attacked the tray of boiled chicken that the stwardess had plopped in front of him, it was at least a blank page, which would give him an opportunity to fill it with a better, braver, and more useful Duvakin.”
Alas, Duvakin learns, there is little opportunity for developing goodness and bravery among the Kazakhs. Viewed as just another meddlesome ”Ivan” from Moscow, he is forced to feign subservience to Momish, the all-powerful old boss he has been sent to depose. At the same time, he is distrustful of Edik, the youthful revolutionary he is meant to assist.
Duvakin soon finds himself at another standstill in life, a powerless observer watching an ancient struggle between the native Kazakhs and the opportunistic Muslims who have slowly filtered northward from the desert. And things get worse: He learns that Ermolov, his predecessor from the home office, was murdered, and that he might easily meet the same fate. Then Anna, his disturbingly nubile stepdaughter arrives, accusing him of desertion; and finally, a telex to the local constable suggests that Duvakin has become the chief suspect in his wife`s death.
It begins to dawn on Duvakin that he is a pawn in a diabolical scheme devised by the energy minister himself. Dumfounded, outraged, Duvakin escapes an assassination attempt during a civil disturbance and goes into hiding. The riot has resulted in cancellation of the elections but provides the energy minister with the leverage to ”retire” Momish and make a decidedly nonsocialistic fortune in the process.
When the minister arrives to preside over the farewell ceremonies, Duvakin is driven to act. Aided by his daughter, he returns from the dead in a hilarious, if credibility-straining, finale that vindicates his life.
Admittedly, plotting seems to suffer in the final act, but by that time, most readers will probably find themselves fully involved in Duvakin`s harrowing existence. He is so unusually real as a protagonist, and his observations about Russian life so wryly compelling, that Olcott can be forgiven.
Here is Duvakin, trying vainly to see the ”sights” of Novii Uzen through the haze of the perennial cyclonic sandstorms:
”Duvakin had heard how the Aral Sea was almost dried up, leaving vast flats of salt and mud exposed to battering sun and blowing winds, but up in Moscow he had paid it no attention; nowadays, everybody was crying. . . . Lake Baikal is polluted, the northern peoples are dying, the Uzbeks are stealing Russian water, Leningrad`s water was too poisoned to drink, the fruits and vegetables had so many fertilizer salts in them that you`d die if you ate them, and the mothers were so degenerate they were having pinheaded children that they couldn`t nurse anyway, because the milk in their breasts was saltier than seawater. Plus AIDS, plus riots, plus train wrecks, plus inflation-so who could care about some pond out in Central Asia.”
”Rough Beast” depicts a country where the only thing that has changed is the means by which the old bosses become new bosses and get their hands on the few spoils that remain. Doubtless Olcott exaggerates, but it`s difficult not to be convinced as we view the world through Duvakin`s eyes.
” `It`s Vakhtang Beria I owe for those labels,` ” says Anna`s lowlife boyfriend, pleading for Duvakin`s help in getting out of a jam. ”The name meant nothing to Duvakin, but it seemed a pretty sound rule of life never to owe money to a man named Vakhtang Beria.”
Olcott`s first Duvakin book was published by the relatively small Academy Chicago Press almost on the heels of Martin Cruz Smith`s hugely successful
”Gorky Park.” As a result, Olcott`s ”Murder at the Red October” and its close successor, ”Mayday in Magadan,” have remained somewhat of a sad secret of the 1980s. If there is any justice, however, all that is about to change.
