3 October 2009
Karma chameleon
The Good Angel of Death
by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Andrew Bromfield (Harvill Secker)
Kolya Sotnikov is a Russian night-watchman at a Kiev storehouse that contains cans of hallucinogenic drugs labelled as baby-food. The previous owners of his new flat left behind a curious volume hidden in a copy of War and Peace, containing marginalia that fire his imagination. He sets off on a picaresque journey in search of something buried in the sands of Kazakhstan by a much-loved Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko. Crossing the Caspian sea in a floating fish-processing plant, Kolya wanders unprepared into the desert, where he surprisingly acquires a Kazakh wife, and gets caught up with a couple of Ukrainian nationalists and a colonel from the secret police.
In between tying one another up and apologising over tea, this motley crew discusses the possibility of a physical manifestation of a national spirit, and Kolya (the narrator) conducts prettily earnest meditations on how songs, or Snickers bars, can contribute to international understanding in hostile terrain. Eventually they arrive at an old fort and begin to dig: the riddle of the sands is solved in an unexpectedly earthy way, and an equally surreal homecoming is planned.
The story meanders along with a faint slapstick humour and a pleasant lack of logic or urgency, but the question for prospective readers of this translation is how well the theme of competing post-Soviet nationalisms will play abroad. Kurkov is Ukrainian, but writes in his native Russian, which has drawn some criticism from his countrymen. According to an article last year in Ukrainian News, he conceived the present novel in part as a response, to dramatize “Ukrainian nationalism and Russian chauvinism”. It is hard to know how much of the text will be screamingly funny to Kurkov’s core audience while sailing right over the heads of non-specialist Anglophone readers. The beautiful, quiet absurdism of Kurkov’s most famous novel, Death and the Penguin, and its sequel Penguin Lost, evidently travelled well; this more explicitly political drama might have more trouble. Only occasionally did I, at least, recognise a twitch of Kurkov’s delicious way with deadpan:
The vodka induced in me a joyful indifference to the immediate future. It was obviously good vodka, the kind that our people had drunk both before the revolution and after.
In contrast to its opening pages in Kiev, which quickly establish a setting of bohemian urbanity, the journey itself has something of the frictionless quality of an allegory, or dream. (The whole thing, one fears at moments, might be a bad baby-food trip, or even a post-mortem reverie.) Kolya’s newfound wife is a paragon of resourceful womanhood, and the colonel is something of a cartoon: indeed, at one point the narrator says, “Even when considering a colonel in the abstract, it’s easy enough to imagine the way he will act” — which is exactly the problem. Kolya himself, meanwhile, is mystifyingly dull and placid throughout. The novel’s boomerang structure ensures a mildly enjoyable return journey through a landscape that appears to be populated exclusively by corrupt officials and violent thugs, in contrast to whom the boring narrator might be a deliberate aesthetic choice, if not a very exciting one.
The novel’s title, finally, alludes to a chameleon that joins Kolya on his voyage, prompting the recollection of a myth about a shape-changing spirit that protects the wayward traveller. One hesitates to criticise a novel by saying “The chameleon lacks personality”, but one has, after all, seen what magic the author can accomplish with larger animals.
© 1996-2010 Steven Poole v3.8 
