Tom Rob Smith: Child 44

[Sybarite]

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

The time is 1953; the place is the Soviet Union. In Moscow, a child dies. Is it an accident or is it murder? The child's family believe it was the latter, but Leo Demidov, a state security officer, is sent to explain to them that, in a socialist paradise, there is no crime and that there could not have been a murder. It was an accident.

However, when Demidov is demoted to the militia, and he and his wife are exiled to the Urals, he comes across a case that is all too similar and, at increased danger to himself, starts to investigate.

Based partly on the murderous career of Andrei Chikatilo, who killed over 60 children while the state refused to acknowledge that such a criminal could exist, Child 44 reads as though an excited schoolboy has discovered just how awful life was in Stalinist Russia and has decided to tell everyone about it. At length. Glorying in as much sadistic detail as possible. And then again in case you missed the point the first time around.

Reading it gives the sensation of being hit around the head repeatedly.
It’s not even as though the thriller – and this is supposed to be a thriller – is particularly good. The characters are poorly drawn and are incredibly crass stereotypes. The dialogue is stilted and painful, and the 'coincidence' at the end is so far-fetched as to be risible, while the denouement itself is rushed and the happy ending is, in the context of 450-odd previous pages of unrelenting misery, is a ludicrously false note.

And it's not original – Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park is an excellent read, chock full of atmosphere (I wanted to race out and buy matjes herrings and vodka as I read it) and which very effectively creates the sense of paranoia and fear in the Soviet Union.

There are also a number of ways in which Demidov can be compared to Cruz Smith's hero, Arkady Renko: both are loyal state officials who get into trouble, lose their positions, are exiled and yet carry on trying to solve a case that the authorities would rather was hushed up or blamed on convenient undesirables.

But as if that wasn't bad enough, Child 44 has somehow made it onto the Booker Prize longlist. How this has happened remains a total mystery, but it does the book no favours at all, making the reader think far more deeply about it than it deserves, simply because you feel that there has to be something that merits the praise that has been heaped on it, plus the Booker longlisting acclaim.

Child 44 is, at best, a mediocre thriller. And that feels like a compliment.

[Stewart]

I was up late last night, finally getting round to gathering my thoughts on this book. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I hated it. Actually, that should be Hated - never underestimate the power of a capital H. In the end, I found myself trying to be fair to the book (after all, if it weren't for the Booker, I wouldn't have touched it), but found myself rambling away. In the end I just closed off the review and thought, to hell with it.

When the Booker longlist was announced late last month, I don’t think there was anyone who would have expected to see Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 make the cut, including Smith himself. It no doubt surprised many that the publisher even had the gall to submit it. Why? Because it’s a thriller and, with the old snobbery hat on, thrillers don’t belong in the Booker. However, that’s a straight out lie, since thrillers have been in the running before, but usually by writers for whom such books are not the only string to their bow. But, as Oscar Wilde said, books are either well written or badly written, and that is all. So which is Child 44?

A portentous cover, featuring praise limited to those also treading the crime genre, such as Lee Child and Nelson DeMille, rings alarm bells. Likewise an encomium from a screenwriter who, from his snippet, can’t seem to see past the action. And in reading Child 44, it’s no surprise to find that Tom Rob Smith is also a screenwriter.
The novel reads like a film and, as it turns out, it started life as a treatment but became a novel at the advice of Smith’s film agent. Sadly, it maintains the shallow depth of a script - dialogue, some scene setting - as Smith has written it with an eye - if not both - squarely on a big budget, big screen outing.

Opening with a scene in Ukraine in 1933, where a couple of young boys hunt for a cat to alleviate the starvation that has gripped the nation, the story then fast fowards twenty years and introduces us to Leo Demidov, war hero and officer in the Ministry of State Security. Demidov is tasked with relaying to the grieving family of a young boy, found mutiltated by a railway lin, that the death was accidental. In this, Smith introduces us to the central conceit of his setting: there is no crime.

“Few people believed this absolutely. There were blemishes: this was a society still in transition, not perfect yet. As an MGB officer it was Leo’s duty to study the works of Lenin, in fact it was every citizen’s duty. He knew that social excesses - crime - would wither away as poverty and want disappeared. They hadn’t reached that plateau yet. Things were stolen, drunken disputes became violent: there were the urki - the criminal gangs. But people had to believe that they were moving to a better state of existence. To call this murder was to take a giant step backwards.

Of course, it’s definitely murder most foul, although similar incidents are treated as isolated ones, with innocents being tried and executed to cover up the fact that Russia has a serial killer in its midst. While it opens with an interesting idea, of a man conflicted between adherence to state doctrine and what his own eyes tell him, these first two hundred plus pages - the events of which are are spelled out in the inside cover - are more a set up for what is to come, namely standard action fare.

It’s a treasure trove of nonsense that leads to the most risible modus operandi put in print. But in getting there, there’s much more to cringe at. Smith has chosen a pointless quirk of representing all dialogue in italics; his research rarely extends beyond a sprinkling of Russian words, each immediately explained; he has trouble maintaining viewpoint, sometimes even within a paragraph; and, most foul, he tells everything. Not at one point do you ever infer something - there’s no imagination required.

Smith bumbles in and out of characters heads, revealing their every thought (where action would be better suited) and it leaves the reader breathless with the book in hand wondering where they come into it. And that’s entertainment? Child 44, I think, is two novels in one, each extremely underdone: the potential conflict study of self and State, and the run of the mill thriller. I suspect Smith intended the latter, and could easily have done away with the first half of the book. But he’s a man who likes to pad out with scenes that would look good on screen, even if they serve nothing on the page.

Without the Booker I would never have read Child 44, and that’s what is most annoying about the book: that is a throwaway entertainment that fails to entertain. We can only guess as to the sanity of the Booker panel in selecting this book. But for a thriller that is supposed to have numerous shocking twists and turns, the biggest shock is that something with so much padding could still leave me so cold.

I really don't get what this is doing on the longlist. It must be a joke.

[Sybarite]

I was looking at Amazon earlier and it's getting absolutely raves from people – apart from a very few who seem to be sharing essentially the same view of it as that of both of us.

I was handed it on Friday to review for a quarterly direct-mailing magazine with a large readership; most of whom are women, many of whom are not well educated and amongst whom the prime choice of newspaper is the Daily Mail. So we do six short reviews (books, DVDs or CDs) in each issue and we try to be guided largely by the nature of the readership and not what we ourselves want to read. In this case, the person who sorts out the reviews gave me Child 44, thinking that a thriller would be acceptable for that readership, but the Booker thing would give us a way of encouraging them to look further. He's doing Netherland – on the basis that that's our 'ambitious' item for the quarter.

About half way through, I was still going to write it up – just on the basis of it being a thriller. But since we have such little space, we don't really do negative reviews. I texted him last night to tell him I'm not wasting space on it and he can give me something else if he wants.

It really is the worst piece of fiction I've read in a very, very long time.

[Stewart]

You know, in thinking about it even more. With the fall of Stalin, the novel seems to say you know what? crime can now exist, and that's why I'm going to be starting my crime series around the adventures of Leo Demidov in Moscow. But, since the novel practically tells the story of Andrei Chikatilo, who was active up to the 1990s, the truth is that he couldn't be caught (interesting blood type/semen discrepancies aside) because the ideologies still insisted that there was no crime.

[Sybarite]

Originally Posted by Stewart

You know, in thinking about it even more. With the fall of Stalin, the novel seems to say you know what? crime can now exist, and that's why I'm going to be starting my crime series around the adventures of Leo Demidov in Moscow. But, since the novel practically tells the story of Andrei Chikatilo, who was active up to the 1990s, the truth is that he couldn't be caught (interesting blood type/semen discrepancies aside) because the ideologies still insisted that there was no crime.

~~LOL~~

And there's no set-up for a sequel at the end, with Demidov's job request, is there?

[Stewart]

I can't remember: I've pretty much banished the book from memory. I just remember him - or perhaps someone else saying - hey, Moscow looks like a nice place to solve crime. You should move there. Ah, yes please.

[Eric]

Thanks Sybarite and Stewart, for solving a mystery of long standing!

Look at this Wiki entry:

Andrei Chikatilo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I had never heard of Chikatilo, but I remember a curious photo, cut out of the Baltic Times or some such newpaper, and which had been pinned up on the wall of the toilet of friends of mine - and stayed there for at least a decade. I never understood whether the photo was a joke or real when I read about cannibalism. There was only the caption, no further text. Now, the mystery has finally been solved by your discussion here.

I imagine that the photo was put up during Chikatilo's second imprisonment. I'm not into this sicko stuff myself. I'd rather read a Rankin or a Conan Doyle, not wallow in all the stuff you can read in gory detail in the Wiki article.