Shoot the messenger

HELEN DUNMORE is not afraid of her readers.

She does not placate them – or at least not much.

The caveat is because with this sequel to The Siege she does contrive what could seem to be a happy ending, even if it is postponed like a promise that everything will turn out right.

Yet she is such a skilful writer that as the chapters follow one another the reader’s increasing anxiety is that everything will indeed turn out right, despite the accumulation of evidence to the contrary. So this little kindness at the end comes as a consolation, given that the central characters of Andrei and Anna have already survived the horrors of the siege of Leningrad 10 years earlier.

If that survival seemed like a miracle, then it was a miracle with a downside as the after-life in Stalinist Russia, which is the context of this new novel, was anything but a bright new dawn. Little did they know it, but this was a case of frying pan and fire. Distinguished by the quality of her prose and by the immediacy and attractiveness of her characters, Helen Dunmore’s new novel grasps the reader’s attention immediately. Anna is a schoolteacher concentrating on the satisfactions of her own married life and on her young brother Kolya, and ignoring the black vans with their cargoes of human misfortune as they pass her in the street.

That is until Andrei, by now a paediatric specialist, is called on to supervise the treatment of the only son of an officer in the secret police.

Quickly aware that the child’s illness is probably terminal and gradually realising that he is the most likely doctor to be held responsible if the outcome is as he anticipates, Andrei begins to prepare himself and Anna for repercussions. Within the hospital colleagues evaporate as whispers carry doom along the corridors. Ward rounds are held at a distance as Andrei becomes an outcast; his consultations with the child’s father are acutely imagined by Dunmore, whose ear for the likely frustrations and anxieties on each side makes these exchanges terse, threatening and credible.

This sense of the real, of the emotional responses of people in both situations, those of the politically powerful but medically impotent father and of the medically confident but politically dispensable doctor, is Dunmore’s special strength. It is what makes this novel compelling, for while as a poet she might be expected to produce gracefully accurate description and does so page after page, it is the power of her historical imagination which gives the book its strength. It is not merely the history of events, of an era in the narrative of an enormous country which she distills into this novel, but the history of ordinary lives, of how to decode the behaviour of neighbours, how to recognise agents of the secret police, how to bury books which might incriminate, how to keep the kitchen cupboards less empty, how to exist with private happiness in a world of public suspicion and fear.

In real life this era culminated in the infamous Doctors’ Trial when Stalin and his coterie were able to invent, investigate and prosecute to the death a conspiracy of Zionists in collusion with the Americans as a strategy of the Cold War. Dunmore uses the Stalinist willingness to believe that natural deaths among high-ranking officials could have been prevented by loyal physicians as the historical core of her plot, giving a valuable authenticity and authority to this gripping novel.