Discoveries

The People’s Act of Love

A Novel

James Meek

Canongate: 392 pp., $24

TWO men emerge from the Siberian darkness: Kyrill Ivanovich Samarin and Gleb Alexeyevich Balashov. Samarin cuts the hand off a soldier lying by the river and buries it in the forest. He eats a piece of the soldier’s horse. Balashov carries a set of surgical instruments and the portrait of a woman in the nearby village of Yazyk, the beautiful widow Anna Petrovna. The men exchange lies. They are both headed for Yazyk.

The year is 1919, and the people of Yazyk have endured the czar, the revolution, the socialists, the Bolsheviks, the influenza and now a group of Czech soldiers, who have taken over the village. Capt. Matula, stupid and cruel, is in charge. Beneath him, Lt. Josef Mutz. (“You seem alone,” Matula tells him. “You seem like a man in the crowd in Vienna, but without the crowd, and without Vienna.”) Many of the villagers belong to a sect of “castrates,” who amputate their genitals in the belief that it turns them into angels and brings them closer to God. In religious rituals, they spin until they have visions of heaven. In the surrounding forest, the Tungus people and their shamans live as they have always lived. The Czech soldiers keep an old shaman on a leash outside the barracks. We enter the village with Samarin and Balashov, both drawn to the widow, Anna Petrovna.

James Meek, a British reporter who lived in Russia from 1991 to 1999, feeds us the essential information as if it were morphine in an intravenous drip. The result is a growing sense of dread, as we realize what these characters have lived through and what they are capable of doing. There is no one to rely on besides Meek: Each character has a secret life and is untrustworthy. “Secrets are for capitalists and bourgeois parasites,” says a captain in the Red Army who comes to save Yazyk (long after most of the damage has been done). “Communist man will be the master of his passions, and he’ll have no reason to keep that secret.”

Anna Petrovna’s secret -- her marriage to a young hussar who succumbed to the spell of the castrates -- is kept even from her son, Alyosha, who believes that his father died in the glory of battle. Samarin’s secret is his cannibalism and his weakness for love. Mutz’s secret is his love for Anna Petrovna. It is a grand novel, and yet Meek’s true genius is his ability to keep a finger on the pulse of each of his characters. All those hearts beating, and the dark forest pressing in, and the armies fighting shifting enemies far away in St. Petersburg make for Joseph Conrad-style horror. A few of these lives are spared, but Meek isn’t into happy endings.

*

Correcting the Landscape

A Novel

Marjorie Kowalski Cole

HarperCollins: 228 pp., $23.95

HERE’S another old-fashioned novel, but this one is closer to home. Gus Traynor is an unmarried middle-aged man living in Fairbanks, Alaska. He’s the publisher-editor-owner of the Mercury, a 24-page community newspaper, and he’s running out of money. Meanwhile, the land is being ravaged by a developer who turns out to be Traynor’s good friend and an investor in the paper. Then there’s Traynor’s deepening love for one of his own reporters, a young Native American named Gayle. In the course of the novel, just about every moral dilemma known to man crops up.

“Correcting the Landscape” is written with a distinct lack of pyrotechnics; the characters are all plain-speaking and pretty clear about who they are. In spite of such contretemps as Traynor’s impending bankruptcy and the murder of Gayle’s cousin, no one indulges in a whole lot of drama. Traynor, as the protagonist, provides an oddly comforting, steady (almost empty) core for the story, which is really about community and friendship. When do you turn away from a problem in your backyard, and when do you risk confrontation? When does a friendship become something more? When do you step into friends’ lives to save them? These are big, common questions, and Marjorie Kowalski Cole’s quiet voice and quiet characters help us to consider them without hyperventilating.