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

I just finished “The Half Life of Valery K” by Natasha Pulley. In all her books, Natasha Pulley writes terrible things happening and acknowledges they are terrible, but the characters are so engaging and there is a sweetness that keeps you reading. This one is no exception, and it has a whole HOST of trigger warnings. I’m sure you can look them up, but the biggest one for me was nuclear accidents and radiation sickness. (It may seem odd for this to be my biggest one considering what all happens in the book, but there is personal history there.) This #book is a bit of a thriller, and a bit of a character study, and it’s queer. And there’s an octopus named Albert who steals the TV remote. So.

This one will stay with me for a while.

Content Warnings

bestknownfor's review

Go to review page

dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75

Content Warnings

zigzagzmak's review

Go to review page

adventurous emotional funny informative mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Possibly my favorite book I've read this year so far and a contender for an all time favorite. I'm a big fan of Pulley's writing style and the way she just sucks you into the story. I read this book in just a few short days, staying up late each night because I couldn't set it down to go to sleep.

The people in this story just feel real, supported by such a real and well researched world inspired by very real events and places. It is so clear how Pulley spent ages reading and understanding the science of radiation and the politics and the history of what it was like in the Soviet union.

Additionally, stories where characters are queer but it's not the point and romance isn't the main storyline are so lovely, and this is no exception. There's a slow burning love story that happens alongside everything else, but in addition to the romantic love we also get to see the way that Valery's platonic love for humanity and his comradeship for those around him inspires rebellion and whistleblowing for the greater good of fellow humans living in danger. A++ work all aroundn with incredibly satisfying payoff that is irrefutable and inevitable without changing the tone or genre of the book when it happens.

Content Warnings

wardenred's review

Go to review page

dark informative mysterious tense slow-paced

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

3.75

Our only strength is in how strong we seem.

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

jens6791's review

Go to review page

dark mysterious tense medium-paced

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

2.0

Oh boy. Where to start.
There are so many problems I have with this book - with the characters and how they're framed, with the pacing, with the treatment of women especially. There is the most superficial overlay of feminism by an author who seems incapable of writing more than one kind of woman. Its honestly kind of insulting. Everything pales in comparison to that one revelation though.

This is not a review for potential readers; more a rant to keep all my thoughts about this in one place. I might have had more patience with the book if I'd read Pulley's other works first and had more goodwill. I might also have been less angry if it didn't start out pretty promising. Be warned that this review has been written in state of annoyance and there will be swearing.

First, the treatment of women by the narrative is abhorrent. Every female character (except for the child) is a ruthless science girlboss. The horrific train scene honestly feels framed more in terms of Valery's character development than anything else. And Anna's been left to care for the kids, while she and her daughter are slowly dying of radiation sickness?? But it's fine at the end because our heroes are together??

I honestly think that this book could have been really good if it actually engaged with the whole fucked-up-ness of its setting and with the characters being who they are and making the decisions they do.

Instead, we get Valery and Shenkov being excused by each other and the narrative for the most awful actions, all in service of the romance storyline. Shenkov is literally a KGB agent who kills people for a repressive state, but from Valery's perspective what we keep being told (this is really just repeated over and over throughout the book) is that Shenkov is man who knows how imposing and threatening he can be, and so he's deliberately kind, but also the system he's forced to participate in makes him brittle and fragile. Yay. Doesn't change the fact that he literally murders innocent people but go off. I cannot believe that this is the love interest. There are times when the book makes a wider point about how the system makes people do terrible things and there's no real escape from the cycle of suspicion and violence (he still shoots the dog), but the narrative uses it to absolve Shenkov of guilt so we root for him and Valery. Which certainly is A Choice.

Now Valery.
Initially I loved his character, I thought his way of seeing the world was fascinating. In the first few chapters especially, I thought Pulley did a fantastic job of using his perspective to navigate the world of Soviet doublespeak. The initial stages of unfolding the mystery of what really happened were done well.
All of that is completely blown out of the water by the revelation that he took part in human radiation trials with fucking Mengele. Genuinely, I don't know what the fuck Pulley or the editors were thinking. If the goal was to tarnish Valery as a character so that he'd be on an equal footing, morally speaking, with Shenkov, it was misguided to say the least. If it was guilt fodder for Valery's backstory, it could have been easily swapped out for something fictional. The inclusion of an Actual Fucking Nazi in the book was just not necessary. It overshadowed literally everything else, and again, is just so, so gross. I understand that the whole book is based on real events, but that's the setting, not the characters. You cannot have your main character collaborate with Nazis and carry out experiments on humans (and we all know precisely who they were carried out on) and still expect your readers root for them. (Although looking at other reviews you apparently can). Moving on from this because I am filled with the rage of a hundred dying suns.

Couple of minor gripes to conclude. The idea of them fleeing to the west and encountering Gender Norms™ for the first time is so bullshit. Were women in the Soviet Union more able to pursue certain careers and at least have the language of equality apply? Absolutely. Does this mean that neither Valery or Shenkov would have encountered misogyny like they do in the UK? Of course not. Pulley obviously did a lot of research for the book, so I don't know why it didn't translate in this dimension.
Finally, the book was just very British. I know the way that the characters speak is to make it equivalently native to Russians speaking Russian, but it honestly just made me laugh in places because it took me (a native English speaker not from the UK) completely out of the atmosphere that the story cultivated.

Okay, rant over. There were a few things I really enjoyed about the book. The setting and background are really strong, there's some beautiful writing and I thought Resovskaya was a fascinating character (mainly because the narrative didn't try to excuse her actions). If the science of it checks out, I definitely learned a lot. Ultimately though, it was a disappointment that did not meet the expectations set by a great opening. Crucially, I feel like it was let down by a few choices and by forcing sweet romantic tropes onto a situation where they don't really work; I'm mad and disappointed.

Content Warnings

krys_kilz's review

Go to review page

mysterious tense medium-paced

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

5.0

Content Warnings

anna_i3's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny informative mysterious sad tense 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? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

wheemsicott's review

Go to review page

dark sad tense slow-paced

2.5

When it comes to Pulley's books, I'm used to looking past the degree of cultural insensitivity she casually throws in the mix every time; I don't think she's capable of coming up with anything that won't elicit a "why is a british white woman writing about this" reaction from me and I've come to just let that stuff sit in the back of my brain while I go along for the ride. The Half Life of Valery K was no exception. I accepted she felt qualified to write about the Soviet Union in such excruciating detail and, while I disagree with her about whether she should, I still enjoyed the characters she crafted.

The plot dragged a bit and I was sad to see all speculative traces wiped out in the face of hard science, but I get it. It fit the story Pulley wanted to tell. What really lowered my rating and soured my general experience of this book to the point I can't think about it without feeling sick is the way it handled patriarchal violence. Pulley wanted so bad to analyze the ways in which men hurt women, but instead she wrote a novel about a male biochemist trying to shed light on the top-secret radiation study he's involved with. And she made the main "villain" (the term feels quite cheap here, but bear with me) a woman.

Already that undermines the goal; not because a woman is doing bad things, but because the protagonist is a guy and his love interest is also a guy. Not the most practical canvas to depict male tyranny. Pulley does try to weave in some social commentary from Valery's Feminist King point of view, and for the most part it works! I believe it! Until she feels the need to put the train sequence in there.

The train sequence is a terrifying, disturbing account of something so inhuman it pushes Valery to kill every single man involved. Good on him, but we first hear about it in a scene that's meant to solely make some ripples in the budding romance between him and his guy. It's all to make him even more sympathetic (as if we needed that--dude's a traumatized kitten) and amp up the tension. We could've done without. We could've done without, or used something else, and instead we get the rape and murder of many desperate young women and girls stuck on a train to the gulag. Now, of course I'm not saying you can't write about these things. You can, and you could argue Pulley does it masterfully by building a visceral crescendo to the act and then cutting right before it happens. But she writes the whole thing as fuel for her male main character. She tries so hard to criticize gendered violence, only to reproduce it on the text in a way that is potentially deeply triggering--just because she needs to make Valery even sadder. Just because she can have him say "almost all (cis) men are monsters ready to explode". What godawful fucking framing, to be frank.

Anyway. I am a fool and I only wanted to write a quick note about a book that clearly chose its subject matter wrong, but here's the full rant instead. I don't think The Half Life of Valery K is an unreadable mess, but it did make me feel gross.

Content Warnings

More...