Where does meaning come from when normalcy disappears?
The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk. HarperVia, 2024. 304 pp., $28.
The Silver Bone, the first in a series of historical mysteries following a newly minted police detective in post-World War I Kyiv, is unconventional.
As a bookseller and a writer, I’m used to recommending books to readers by means of other, similar books—“if you liked X, you’ll like Y.” It’s the standard marketing strategy of the American book industry. In fact, writers seeking agents or editors are expected to have two or three “comp titles” ready at hand when they pitch their books. These comp titles are ideally books within the same genre, fairly recent, and relatively successful.
I would have a hard time coming up with two or three close comp titles for The Silver Bone. It’s a mystery novel in which the mystery itself—involving the odd double homicide of a tailor and a Red Army soldier—isn’t really important. At least, it isn’t what’s most important. If you come to The Silver Bone expecting a typical whodunnit, you’re probably going to go away disappointed. It’s not a page-turner—at least not in the sense of being fast-paced, though it certainly starts with an attention-grabbing in medias res: in the opening sentences, the protagonist, young Samson Kolechko, watches his father get hacked down by Cossack horsemen in a random, senseless act of violence. There’s an element of magical realism: Samson loses an ear in the same attack but finds that he can still hear through the severed organ. He frequently uses the ear, kept in a tin box for safekeeping, as a handy hidden listening device as he pursues suspects.
After the vivid opening, the story moves along at an unhurried, almost gentle pace, taking its time immersing the reader in 1919 Kyiv, a setting that will probably be wholly unfamiliar to most readers of this English translation by Boris Dralyuk. This is Kyiv in the aftermath of world war and revolution. It’s a city freshly fought over, claimed, reclaimed, and torn apart by warring factions, mainly the Bolsheviks and the forces of Symon Petliura, leader of the (anti-Soviet) Ukrainian People’s Republic.
I use “immerse” deliberately. The reader is dropped, with very little context, right into the middle of this bloody, anarchic, bewildering, at times surreal world. The details of day-to-day life are finely drawn—which faction’s currency is in use on any given day? How long will the electricity last when the lumberjacks who provide wood to the power plant have all been mobilized into one army or another? Big-picture explanations are few.
This seems intentional: The reader has no more understanding than Samson himself. Like Samson, the reader is left to put together the pieces in a world that has stopped making sense. For the most part, the characters in The Silver Bone—with a few exceptions, like that of Samson’s idealistic Bolshevik love interest Nadezhda—take things as they come, with resigned acceptance or pragmatic, resourceful adaptation, or some combination of both. One group of marauding bandits is very much indistinguishable from the next. The confusion is part of the point.
I found it effective. Some readers may find it frustrating. Having written historical fiction in which multiple factions with confusing acronyms are all at war with each other, I know there will be some readers who’d prefer to have carefully detailed explanations of the various groups vying for control of Kyiv, even if the characters themselves don’t have that luxury. For those readers, I’ll note that there is a helpful timeline included in the back matter, tracing Ukraine’s tumultuous—and, to American readers, virtually unknown—history from 1917-1921.
Perhaps the closest comp title that comes to mind for The Silver Bone is another unconventional detective story: Ben H. Winters’s 2012 novel The Last Policeman. At first glance, the two have very little in common. The Last Policeman is near-future science fiction in which an asteroid impact event is about to end all life on earth. The titular last policeman is Hank Palace, a police detective who carries on trying to solve a murder on his own when most of his colleagues don’t see the point anymore. Does justice even matter or mean anything when everybody’s going to die in a few months anyway?
A decade or so after reading The Last Policeman, I remember little of its plot. But I remember the apocalyptic setting, and the way it makes the reader think about what exactly gives our lives meaning and purpose when the normal order of things has been upset, when all rules and norms have been stripped away.
The Silver Bone uses its apocalyptic setting to the same effect. This isn’t a plot-driven book; the mystery isn’t particularly twisty or the denouement particularly surprising. It’s more a character study, though some characters—Samson; Nayden, his superior; Kholodny, his sometime investigative partner, a former priest-turned-atheist-turned-?—are more fully fleshed out than others. Nadezhda is introduced as a hotheaded, outspoken idealist but is relegated to the quieter, more conventional role of Samson’s worried girlfriend as the story progresses. It will be interesting to see how her character is developed over the course of the series.
Above all, Kurkov seems interested in the question of what happens to fairly average people leading fairly mundane lives when the world as they know it ends. Samson, a former electrical engineering student, seeks refuge in the order and rule of law promised by the new Bolshevik authorities. “That’s precisely what life requires,” a friend agrees after Samson takes a job on the police force—“a settled order, established by law, so that the same rules apply to everyone.”
“That’s what we’ll have,” Samson declares. (It will be interesting to see how this, too, is developed over the course of the series.)
Given both Kurkov’s body of work and the context in which The Silver Bone appears—now the third year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—it’s perhaps unsurprising that this book is concerned, first and foremost, with ordinary people’s attempts to adapt, survive, and find meaning in the upheaval of war. “Will I ever be able not to write about the war?” Kurkov asked in his Diary of an Invasion, before going on to explain that he’d had to set aside his work in progress, “a novel about events in Kyiv in the spring of 1919 during the civil war that began after the Russian Revolution of 1917.” “I could no longer think about fiction,” he explained.
That novel was the third installment of the Kyiv Mysteries series. As The Silver Bone hits bookstore shelves in English translation, Kurkov has started thinking about fiction again. He is resuming work on the unfinished manuscript. But he is still unable, it seems, not to write about the war.
“If it was a novel about something abstract and remote from reality I probably wouldn’t be able to write it until the end of the war,” he explained to The Guardian. “But because I’m writing about Kyiv in wartime I hope I may now have something more useful to say. Anyway, I’m going to try.”
Amanda McCrina writes historical fiction about Poland and Ukraine during World War II and the Cold War, inspired by her own family’s heritage. Her latest is I’ll Tell You No Lies (FSG, 2023). She lives outside Nashville, Tennessee.