Reviews with content warning for Death - The Half Life of Valery K

I was a bit apprehensive about picking up this book. On one hand, a friend whose reading tastes often match mine has been singing it praises, and also, I'm morbidly fascinated by the history of nuclear research and related disasters in the Soviet Union, the Kyshtym dysaster in particular. So I was curious about a potential new take on it. On the other hand, at the time when everyone around me loved The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, I couldn't even get past the first couple of chapters, so I thought Natasha Pulley just may not be the author for me. And also, I'm often wary about reading books set in Russia/USSR/any post-Soviet countries written by Western authors, because for some incomprehensible reason, they always get a lot of very basic things wrong and I end up being constantly taken out of the story. I don't know what it is about Russia/USSR that makes it so hard to research. I know we Slavs are weird, but we're not aliens. It should be possible to get the facts straight, the information is out there!

Anyway, I did pick up the book eventually, and I don't regret it. The plot was solid, the vibes were just right, and while I can't say I liked any of the characters, I definitely found them fascinating. The titular Valery is a textbook example of the Well-Intentioned Extremist trope who saves the good guys and mass-murders the bad ones with equal cheer. His friend and love interest, the KGB agent Shenkov, is the kind of character I kind of love to hate: someone who has decided the only way to combat an evil system is by joining it and committing lesser evils in its name: "If I don't do it, a psychopath would do the same thing but worth." Honestly, the only two characters I would actually want to hang out with were Shenkov's wife Natasha and Albert the literal octopus, but I found all the rest of them endlessly fascinating. There were a lot of super poignant scenes here, some of which are definitely going to stick with me for ages, like Valery's conversation with Shenkov's daughter about death, or his and Shenkov's night in Moscow. I also loved the way the science was woven into the plot, and how solid it was, or at least felt to me. This book contains a better explanation of what radiation is than any scientific article I've encountered.

As for the portrayal of USSR... um. Yes, I did get taken out of the story numerous times. The big picture stuff was actually spot on! The dystopian feel of the communist reality, the state's constant reliance on being overrestimated by the evil west while underestimating the enemy like there's no tomorrow, everyone being an unreliable narrator in their own life because you've gotta keep telling lies that you know everyone knows are lies but the point is to keep telling them. Ideas before people. All the interactions with Moscow authorities. The mentions of the famine and the Ukrainian nationalists. All of that was definitely well done and familiar, both through my parents' and grandparents stories and attitudes and to an extent first-hand, because hey, modern Russia isn't exactly far off from its USSR roots, especially nowadays.

But then came the minor stuff that just kept making me facepalm and roll my eyes. Early on, Valery arrives to Sverdlovsk and comments that he's never heard of it, and that alone almost made me drop the book because I couldn't imagine being immersed into a story that treats the facts so damn wrong. Listen. It's absolutely impossible that an educated Soviet man didn't know what Sverdlovsk was. Just 100% impossible, okay? I don't know what the author was even thinking. Maybe that he hasn't ever lived anywhere near it or something, that Russia is huge? But, well, it's an equivalent of a California never knowing of Boston or something. It's ridiculous. The city that was known as Sverdlovsk under Soviets is currently called Yekateringburg. It was also called Yekaterinburg in the past, way before the USSR even existed. It was founded in goddamn 1723. It's been the site of numerous historical events, INCLUDING the establishment of the USSR itself! It's literally where they shot the last Tzar! I... I can't even. This makes negative amount of sense for Valery to never have heard of it.

Or, like, here are Shenkov's thoughts about another prominent city: "Chelyabinsk had no military significance. Its largest industry was tractor-building." Are you kidding me? We're in cold war times, post WW2. It's not what people talked about, but it's what everyone and their dog knew: tractor-building = tank-building and god-knows-what-other-military-shit-building, too. During WW2, it was where plenty of the factories went to make supplies for the frontlines. It didn't just have a "tractor-building" industry, by the by, it also had a railway-building factory that coincidentally (because every industry = military industry in the communist heaven, remember?) was the place where some of the best Soviet tanks of their time were first constructed, and that wasn't even a secret, that was a point of pride. They made artillery there, and missiles, and plenty of other shit, and this was a place where they started training military personnel during WW2 and never, ever stopped, and this is all literally Wikipedia-level research.

There were plenty of other details, like numerous mentions of God/Jesus. I'm not saying that never happened, but people of these characters' age, in these characters' positions, and under these characters' circumstances wouldn't have mentioned God so often. They'd go for equivalents of "damn it" or expletives or literally anything else that didn't go against the Soviet world view, and religion went against the Soviet world view. They literally had a subject called "scientific atheism" in every university. It was a point of importance to eradicate faith. Or, like, the constant presence of tv remotes? I don't know, maybe some top-end tv set's had those, but it's not what I associate with Soviet-made tech at all. I distinctly remember how my entire family was having fun with our first remote for our first non-Soviet-made tv-set in the 1990s. Before that, when you wanted to switch the channel, you got up, went to your tv, and turned a knob to the side of the screen. It wasn't like you'd have to do it often. There were 2-5 channels to pick from at most, depending on the time period and the region you were in.

There's also the matter of the book being written in a distinctly British English with lots of specific turns of spech that make no sense in context when you look at them closely. A random example: "he would ask them whatever they'd been smoking." Using a phrase like that, no matter how jokingly/ironically, implies a possibility of those people smoking something that would alter their minds. I'm not saying there were no drugs in the Soviet Union, but they weren't a thing that popped to mind, outside of specific communities, and mostly at a later time than the book is set in. "Whatever they'd been drinking" or even "how hard they'd been drinking" would have conveyed the same effect without clashing with the realities. Also, there's that detail about Shenkov pronouncing Valery's name without the final sound (й), and honestly... how? Why? With some accents, the й would be a bit shorter, less prominent, but it would still be distinctly there! You don't just drop the final sound like that, it doesn't even sound natural, nobody would do it. Maybe if Shenkov started addressing/referring to Valery as Valera or something without being invited to, that would have conveyed a similar effect without breaking my brain. :D

Also, I'm not sure the characters would have been quite so shocked by the misogyny they saw in the West. Women in the USSR faced their own challenges, which is something Valery does acknowledge at multiple points to be fair. While they were expected to work and had better chances at building careers, especially if they came from sufficiently privileged backgrounds and/or especially after WW2 when the male population suffered a huge blow for understandable reasons, that arrangement Shenkov had with Natasha? Where he was the one to take care of the kids while she delved into science? That was extremely rare. Women were expected to work *and* be the housekeepers for their family. My Grandma was in charge of one of the biggest libraries in her city, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, she had a great career, and then she came home in the evenings and cooked supper for the entire family before she could sit down. My Grandpa was kind enough to do the dishes afterward and to take out the trash, and on weekends he helped with some of the cleaning. But mostly, keeping house was still firmly a woman's work, and men helped if they were willing to. Admittedly, it was such a natural thing for many that perhaps it was the characters' male gaze that prevented them from seeing that clearly.

I could probably go on, but instead I'll just once again say that yeah, I liked the book as a story. I would have probably liked it even more if I didn't grow up in the realities the author's trying to portray and didn't know how off the portrayal was.

Content Warnings

breadwitchery's review

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adventurous mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

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bel017's review

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adventurous challenging dark sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix

Too horrifying for me (though I finished it), should have checked the content warnings first.

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spacebornfew's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

On one hand, this book gave me exactly what I wanted, it follows a formula that just makes something in my heart clench. It was, as always with Natahsa Pulley novels, hauntingly beautiful, tragic and tender. With bonus octopus.

However it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore how poorly her female characters are treated. You can't help but feel that they are plot devices purely there to move things along for the leading men. Considering the book explores sexism and gender, at some points in quite a heavy handed manner, it feels incredibly jarring to still not have women exist to have some purpose beyond window dressing.

It's also very dark, at points a lot darker than her other novels which I had not entirely expected.

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readundancies's review

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dark inspiring tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.25

I am on a fucking roll with reads right now.

This one was no different. I was living my best radioactive life here.

I also immediately fell in love with Valery from like the first couple pages. He’d named a prison rat Boris. BORIS. That is simply the most perfect name for a rat, and I will not be taking comments regarding that claim at this time.

Ok, so as a student becoming a nuclear energy worker in the medical field, the lack of dosimeters in this story is terrifying. And as we slowly get more clues from Valery’s research, I was getting more and more tense and anxious. I can’t even imagine being in Valery’s position, I would be drowning in a sea of perpetual desperation knowing what he knows and not being able to do fuck all about it. The death that lingered around every corner of City 40 would force anyone into a state of deep antipathy just to numb one enough to be able to survive another day.

The discussions on ethics and morality and sacrifice for the greater good were frustratingly based in reality and it’s depressing as fuck. But so we’ll written. Natasha Pulley sure knows how to write in a manner that can provoke an emotional response in her readers. Because the writing is chilling. I had goosebumps. Like this shit was dark. We’re talking human atrocities being commonplace and enforced in a manner that is beyond callous and unfeeling, beyond immorality, kind of dark. It was transactional and frigid and hollowed out to the point where the nothingness that remains is sinister.

How to describe how much the writing unnerved me? Well, my anxiety was a physical presence, sitting next to me. I was all tense and uncomfortable with the plot and its focus on radiation effects on humans, and it’s entirely due to the phenomenal writing. It’s got this quiet and sort of understated brilliance to it, and Valery’s perspective specifically has this soft honesty to his voice. I glommed onto his character immediately.

This was such a good read, truly. There was this hopefulness amongst all the dark topics and themes that the plot delved into, and Valery was like a port in the storm, a Lighthouse signalling out to those who are lost (aka the readers).

The ending is rather out of place however. We get a resolution but it’s rather odd and awkwardly tacked on based on everything that comes before it, and there’s still a lot that could have been addressed that just isn’t. Let’s also not gloss over the discussion on gender roles that occurs which I think was supposed to be reflective of the time period and instead just came off as strange and unnecessary.

I also understand why this book is polarizing based on historical inaccuracies and historical figures who were included, as well as the fact that you can totally tell that the author is not Russian at all based on the dialogue alone. I think the historical angle is understandably a main gripe for some, but coming from a STEM background, I was drawn to the prose concerning the chemistry and physics. And I can only gush that I really enjoyed those science aspects, especially since I have both a chemistry and a radiation sciences degree. I thought they were not only written in a manner that made sense for those that may not be familiar with radiation to any large degree but also in a way that just added to the serene and lulling prose.

I’ve also seen some criticism regarding female portrayal in Natasha Pulley’s books. In this case, I understand but I don’t think it was maliciously misogynistic, I think it’s part to do with the nature of the content and how dark it is and also the fact that the characterization outside of Valery and Shenkov is decidedly lacking. All of the secondary characters are very surface level, not a lot of substance, or not a lot of substance that’s explored. More of the former I think.

Regardless, I think if you like a genre defying read, this is not a bad bet. Because this book was so many things: a sweet little queer love story (not to be confused with a romance, a love story), a political thriller, a historical nightmare that dredges up a very dark part of the Cold War, a brief introduction to nuclear radiation written with an eye for science, a glimpse into the dark annals of academia and the lines humanity will cross against morality and ethicality when it comes to the pursuit of knowledge, and a tale of survival despite the odds and in the face of extreme adversity choosing to take a stand with kindness in your heart and a smile on your face.

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btrz7's review against another edition

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dark medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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