Child 44
Record details
- ISBN: 9780446572767 (paperback)
-
Physical Description:
468 pages : map ; 21 cm
regular print
print - Edition: First trade edition.
- Publisher: New York : Grand Central Publishing, 2011
- Copyright: ©2008
Content descriptions
Bibliography, etc. Note: | Includes bibliographical references. |
Search for related items by subject
Subject: | Secret service -- Soviet Union -- Fiction Soviet Union -- History -- 1925-1953 -- Fiction |
Genre: | Suspense fiction. |
Available copies
- 2 of 2 copies available at BC Interlibrary Connect.
Holds
- 0 current holds with 2 total copies.
Other Formats and Editions
Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Holdable? | Status | Due Date |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Hazelton Public Library | Fic (Text) | 35154000106306 | Adult Fiction - Main Floor | Volume hold | Available | - |
Tumbler Ridge Public Library | AF SMITH (Text) | TRL32318 | Adult Fiction | Volume hold | Available | - |
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2008 February #1
*Starred Review* In the workers' paradise of Stalin's Russia, crime cannot exist. Loyal, hardworking citizens will have all their needs met by the state, making crime unnecessary. The one exception is political crime, and MGB (State Security) officer Leo Demidov works long hours arresting people and delivering them to dreaded Lubyanka Prison. Deeply patriotic, but covetous of the perks of his position, Leo knows that many of the people he arrests are innocent, and he knows that he could suffer a similar fate. He does, almost, when office politics, MGB style, dictate his transfer to the lowly militia in a small city hundreds of miles east of Moscow. There he discovers that a serial killer is preying on children in cities along the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Having lost almost everything, Leo seeks redemption by hunting the killer, but his effort makes him a high-profile enemy of the state (acknowledging that a serial killer could exist in the USSR is tantamount to treason). Child 44 powerfully personalizes the Orwellian horrors of life in Stalin's Russia. Almost every page echoes Hobbes' description of the life of man: "nasty, brutish, and short." First-novelist Smith's pacing is relentless; readers wanting to put the book down for a brief rest may find themselves persevering regardless. Expect the same kind of critical acclaim for this compelling tale that greeted the publication of Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park (1981)Â more than 25 years ago. Like most first novels, Smith's debut isn't perfect, but it's a very, very good read. Don't miss it. Copyright 2008 Booklist Reviews. - BookPage Reviews : BookPage Reviews 2008 May
Cold caseTracking a serial killer in Stalinist Russia
Leo Demidov's personal hell has truly been paved with the best of intentions. The Soviet 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, all in service to the greater good of communism. 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. The child is, in fact, a victim of an evil the Soviet state has never seen before: a serial killer.
Welcome to Child 44, a grisly and gripping redemption tale constructed by 28-year-old British newcomer Tom Rob Smith that puts the screws to your personal sense of morality. Would you betray your spouse to save yourself or your parents? Could you conduct torture, or endure it? Could you execute your own sibling? These are just a few of the dark choices Leo must face in this bone-chilling, frostbitten thriller.
"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 says. "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?"
Initially at least, readers may be more repulsed by than attracted to Leo. He is, after all, a state-employed grim reaper whose parents and wife Raisa live comfortably because of the terrible things he does to real and rumored dissidents alike. But when Vasili, Leo's scheming subordinate, plants doubts about Leo within the paranoid hierarchy, Leo and Raisa find themselves exiled to the boondocks.
That's where Leo begins putting together the missing-children puzzle pieces, an unauthorized activity that unintentionally results in a one-way trip to the gulags for some 200 suspected homosexuals. It also makes Leo and Raisa fugitives from Vasili, now Leo's superior, who seeks to crush the pair before they can expose crimes that have already been officially paid for by such convenient scapegoats as mental patients and gays.
"Leo is the kind of character you see in Conrad a lot, which is this idealism gone wrong," says Smith. "He is someone who is fundamentally a good person, but in the attempt to arrest someone who is genuinely guilty, he is then persecuted for it. It's an interesting flip for me, but then it's an interesting redemption for him."
Dark secrets from Leo's past lead to a surprising and satisfying conclusion. Smith is already hard at work on a sequel, The Secret Speech, which picks up Leo's story three years later when thousands of those whose lives Leo ruined are released from the gulags.
What prompted Smith to set a serial killer thriller within one of the world's most repressive regimes? History, actually. The London-based, Cambridge-educated television screenwriter and editor was working on a screen adaptation of "Somewhere the Shadow," a short story by U.K. science fiction writer Jeff Noon (Vurt; Pollen) when he happened upon the true-crime case of Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo.
"He was what were called 'pushers' whose job was basically to go and beg a factory to deliver whatever it had promised to deliver, because everyone was behind on these deliveries. So he had this job going up and down the country by rail, which enabled him to kill over a wide distance," he says.
Smith dove into researching the Soviet Union, 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.
"My first thought was that this would make a great movie, so I wrote a 12-page outline and pitched it to my film agent," says Smith. "He said, 'Well, it's Stalinist Russia, it's period, it's going to cost $80-$100 million to produce and there are only like three directors in the world who can get this off the ground. You're an unknown writer; you're shooting for the moon.' Instead, he suggested that I should write it as a book."
Smith credits Child 44's breathless pace to his screenwriting background. "In screenwriting, you think about set pieces a lot. Movie directors are very ruthless about making sure that things happen at the right point and that things are always happening; you can't have, say, 10 dull minutes. That's something that I took from screenwriting and applied to this."
That said, Smith loved the freedom of prose. "There are things in this book that I could never have done in a movie script," he admits. "One of the things I love about writing prose is that you can bring peripheral characters absolutely to the forefront of the action in two paragraphs and really explore them in a way that is very difficult to do in movies."
Although readers should brace themselves for a few uncomfortable scenes of violence and torture in Child 44, most of the horrors occur in our heads, not on the page, as Smith exposes the agonizing paranoia of the Stalinist era.
Objections to the book's violence "surprise me slightly, not in the sense that I thought it was going to be an easy read, but I'm not really interested in gore," he says. "It's like describing sex in a book; it's very difficult because it just becomes almost anatomical and slightly uninteresting. I'm interested in the emotional side of things."
About that expensive movie version: Child 44 has been optioned by one of those three green-light directors, Ridley Scott of Blade Runner, Alien and Gladiator fame. Will Smith be writing the screenplay?
"No. I spent two-and-a-half years playing on the strengths of this as a book. I didn't really feel like I was the person to then rediscover it as a movie. I thought, someone needs to come at this fresh."
Jay MacDonald writes from snow-free Austin. Copyright 2008 BookPage Reviews.
- Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2008 March #1
During the terror of Stalin's last days, a secret policeman becomes a detective stalking a serial killer in a debut novel from a shockingly talented 28-year-old Brit.Skillfully drawing on the only totalitarian milieu more frightening than the Nazis, Smith opens the book in a village of starving kulaks, where two young brothers set out in the snow to trap the last local cat that hasn't been eaten. Myopic young Andrei throws himself on the frantic feline only to have both cat and older brother Pavel snatched by a mysterious man who bags them and disappears, leaving Andrei to stumble home alone. Both Pavel and Andrei figure later in a plot that shifts to the early '50s as Father Stalin has begun his final mad purges. War hero MGB officer Leo Stepanovich Demidov begins to realize, during the course of performing his brutal State Security duties, that the death of the four-year-old son of a younger associate may not have been as accidental as the official report suggested. Family and neighbors claim that the child was brutally assaulted before being left on the railroad tracks. The problem for good soldier Leo is that in the Glorious Workers' Paradise, where every citizen has everything he needs, there is no such thing as crime. There are only attacks by the corrupt outside world. Leo has another problem. His beautiful wife Raisa, whom he suspects of infidelity, has been charged by Leo's vicious rival Vasili with espionage, and Leo has been ordered to verify that claim. Learning too late that the innocent and faithful Raisa fears rather than loves him, rattled by Vasili's treachery, knowing that he is damaged goods, Leo counts himself lucky to be exiled to duty in a hick town where he discovers further murders and begins a hair-raising hunt for the perpetrator.Nerve-wracking pace and atmosphere camouflage wild coincidences. Smashing.Film rights to Ridley Scott/Fox 2000. Agent: James Gill/PFD Copyright Kirkus 2008 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2008 March #2
Grisly, gruesome, and gory are just three ways to describe this debut novel by young British screenwriter Smith. While adapting a short story by sf writer Jeff Noon, Smith came across the true account of Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, who after killing more than 50 women and children was executed in 1994. His story inspired Smith to write this grim, 1953-set novel, which ties together just about all of the worst aspects of the Stalinist regime. The Ukrainian famine and the unrelieved horror of the gulag, among other historical hooks, add to the saga of ex-soldier and police official Leo Demidov, who dissects the morbid clues left by the killer. The paradox of crime in a workers' paradise denies any legitimacy to Leo's investigation, since, by definition, such repellent crimes are impossible. With some 20 foreign sales to date and film rights already in Ridley Scott's hands, this successor to Hannibal Lector's lurid mantle has nonstop plotting, a nonstop pace, and even a surprise ending. Horror genre readers will thrill to it; others may be advised to ask for a barf bag as well as their date due slip. Suspense collections in large libraries will likely need several copies to fill waiting lists. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/08.]âBarbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA
[Page 63]. Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2008 January #1
Security officer Leo Demidov could tackle the serial killer rampaging through Stalin's Russia if he weren't being treated as an enemy of the state. Film rights to Ridley Scott; foreign rights to 19 countries. Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2008 March #1
Set in the Soviet Union in 1953, this stellar debut from British author Smith offers appealing characters, a strong plot and authentic period detail. When war hero Leo Stepanovich Demidov, a rising star in the MGB, the State Security force, is assigned to look into the death of a child, Leo is annoyed, first because this takes him away from a more important case, but, more importantly, because the parents insist the child was murdered. In Stalinist Russia, there's no such thing as murder; the only criminals are those who are enemies of the state. After attempting to curb the violent excesses of his second-in-command, Leo is forced to investigate his own wife, the beautiful Raisa, who's suspected of being an Anglo-American sympathizer. Demoted and exiled from Moscow, Leo stumbles onto more evidence of the child killer. The evocation of the deadly cloud-cuckoo-land of Russia during Stalin's final days will remind many of Gorky Park and Darkness at Noon , but the novel remains Smith's alone, completely original and absolutely satisfying. Rights sold in more than 20 countries. (May)
[Page 29]. Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.