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4.3 AVERAGE
4.3 AVERAGE
Do not take any of the historical/scientific material in this book as accurate. Or, I've learned a lot about Nuclear physics and Soviet history because I checked the research that Pulley kept messing up.
Pulley clearly has skill as a writer, but that is not matched by her ability to research. What's truly disappointing is that it's clear that Pulley attempted to research this novel, but again and again she flubbed often plot critical details. I mean, it's reeeeaaaally bad.
I'm going to go over way to may examples, but I'll still with the short discussion of the 'demon core' since it's illustrative of the books pervasive errors. This is plot important quite late in the story, but I can avoid spoilers. According to the book, the so called demon core is a pair of beryllium hemispheres that were placed around a plutonium sphere to test how close to criticality the sphere is.
The first error is that the demon core was actually a specific plutonium sphere. The demon core was so named because it was involved in two separate criticality accidents that killed two different scientists at Los Alamos (and perhaps more people years later, though that's less clear). This core would have been used in a third nuclear bomb had Japan not surrendered. Since it was not detonated, there were experiments to see how far from critical this core was, and one of those involved beryllium hemispheres.
The method involved in that experiment did, as Pulley described, use a screwdriver to keep the hemispheres separate to keep the core below criticality. On the day of the 'criticality accident', the screwdriver slipped, the two hemispheres came fully together, resulting in lethal levels of radiation in the brief moment before the hemispheres were moved apart.
This book states that no one had suggested that this was dangerous. That is false. At the very least, Enrico Fermi had witnessed the experiment and warned against it. Moreover, the experimental protocol was to use shims instead of a screwdriver. (Honestly, a lot of the discussion around the individuals killed was disgusting and disrespectful to their lives, though that is bad taste not research error).
A bigger error--and one that arises throughout this book--is a misunderstanding of what criticality is. In reality, criticality refers to a state when a nuclear reaction is at a steady state level--the kind of level that is desired in a nuclear power reactor, where it has to be carefully controlled. Pulley actually means supercriticality here and elsewhere, where the nuclear reaction speeds up. This distinction may not matter much to lay people, but nuclear scientist characters should not make such errors.
This isn't just an issue of terminology. Pulley also misunderstands the consequences of (super)criticality. She assumes that, should fissile material reach (super)criticality, then a nuclear explosion would occur.
This is wrong. A nuclear explosion is extremely difficult to achieve. Not unless does supercriticality have to be achieved, but the speed of nuclear reaction has to go up incredibly quickly to produce an explosion. In real life, the demon core reached supercriticality during each of the two fatal accidents--but it did not explode. Nuclear weapons need to be carefully set off to create a nuclear explosion. Originally this used a sphere of conventional explosions meticuluosly synchroniced around a sphere of nuclear material. Nuclear weapons have fizzled when that hasn't gone right.
Pulley makes these criticality/nuclear explosion errors on mulitple occasions. She creates fear of gigantic explosions when they could not have happened. For instance, there is concerns that nuclear waste products that have sorted themselves out so there is a layer of plutonium might react with water and lead to a nuclear explosion. The reaction would be bad--creating smaller explosions and clouds of radioactive gas.
Honestly, it seems like Pulley didn't realize that explosions involving nuclear material might not be nuclear explosions.
To step back, some of these errors might have been intentional character errors--though it would be very odd for nuclear scientists to make the errors of scientific facts, but erroneous knowledge of the accidents surrounding the demon core is plausible. Given the frequency of errors in this book, it seems doubtful. But, looking to the afterword, it's clear that the author is making the errors while believing the science (and history, etc) are accurate.
In the afterword, Pulley mentions a paper written by Kabakchi and Putilov and then provides a brief and erroneous summary. The paper is about what caused the Kyshtym disaster that set the stage for this book. I'll get into this book's version of that disaster in a minute. The first error in understanding the paper is that Pulley states that Kabakchi and Putilov used indirect data to determine what happened since direct data was not available. However, the authors themselves said that direct data was available, and that previous scientists had already compared that direct data with indirect data to confirm that the two matched. Pulley says that these two authors 'guessed' that the explosion was down to ammonium nitrate in a storage tank. That possibility is mentioned in this paper, but not as the conclusion of Kabakchi and Putilov, but as a discussion of an earlier paper. Instead, this paper refines the picture established by previous scientists, establishing details/ranges for temperature, explosive power, and so on. Of note, Pulley never goes into the most basic version of what caused the disaster even though it was discussed in this paper. A failure in the cooling system--and the fact that that cooling system was not repaired--led to an explosion.
Now, back to the book's version of the disaster. First, Pulley makes this out to have been a nuclear type explosion (the account is vague, but there are hints such as the electromagnetic pulse). However, the explosion was not a nuclear explosion. It was more like a dirty bomb, with a non-nuclear explosion spreading radioactive material. Pulley also erroneously has the radiation reaching the city of Chelyabinsk--or as stated in the afterword it "caused acute radiation sickness in people as far away as Chelyabinsk". This is false on two grounds. First, the radiation did not reach the city of Chelyabinsk. The winds steered the radiation largely toward the northeast, while Chelyabinsk lay to the south south east. Also, the winds deposited high levels of radioactive material much much further away than Chelyabinsk, just in a relatively thin line (The wikipedia page for the Kyshtym disaster displays a map showing where scientists think the radiation reached, as well as the concentrations of radioactive material).
In fact, due to the winds and the relative position of Chelyabinsk 40 (aka City 40, Lake, etc, now officially named Ozyorsk), the radiation deposited from the explosion was apparently less there than some areas a hundred kilometers away. A considerable amount of radiation did arrive on the shoes of those who worked at the Lighthouse (Mayak). It should said here, that Pulley's novel places Chelyabinsky 40 and the Lighthouse too close. The actual nuclear facility was on the opposite side of a large lake from Chelyabinsk 40, far enough away that it would be close to impossible, if not impossible, to see the reactors from Chelyabinsk 40, even though Valery in one scene point out one of the facilities to residents of Chelyabinsk 40.
The geography is, in general, extremely distorted. Valery points out the nuclear facility after he sees children playing in a river contaminated with nuclear waste. However, while the Techa river was for a time used as a nuclear waste dump, the Techa flows in the opposite direction, away from Chelyabinsk 40. In another example of mixed up geography, Valery first sees signs of radiation damage about 30km from Chelyabinsky 40 when he is being taken by taxi from Sverdlovsk. However, Sverdlovsk is to the north, so Valery would not have traveled through the East Ural Radioactive Trace (unless the taxi driver took a roundabout route). The same section mentions Valery's confusion about the name Chelyabinsk 40, since Chelyabinsk is nowhere near--Valery notes that is was back the way they had come. But that is wrong--Chelyabinsk is to the south south east, more or less the opposite direction from where Valery had come.
One other detail I'll mention here. The disaster is today known as the Kyshtym disaster. It was only named that because Chelyabinsk 40 and Mayak, being secret, did not appear on maps. Kyshtym was the closest town that did appear on the map, but it had nothing to do with the disaster (compare how Ebola virus is named after the Ebola river, which wasn't particularly close to the village where western scientists first encountered it). Pulley misunderstands what Kyshtym is and uses it as another moniker for the facility/community, for instance with a huge poster that says "We are Kyshtym! We are the Shield!"
Enough errors of science (and geography). Onto Soviet society.
Other Goodreads reviews cover a number of issues with Soviet/Russian culture which I will not attempt to repeat. I want instead to focus on this books setting in time--Pulley doesn't reckon with the fact that times change. Much of what comes out in this book would have been plausible if it was set about ten or more years earlier. About ten years before the main action of this book, Joseph Stalin died. Nikita Khrushchev came to power a few months later and steadily brought in greater freedom (at least relatively). I haven't done enough reading to check whether the details of oppression would have been accurate if this book was set under Stalin, but it is clear that it is not accurate for it's actual time period.
Valery begins this book in a Gulag prison, as a political prisoner. However, after Stalin's death, the vast majority of prisoners--including ordinary criminals, were released. That actually took place before Khrushchev came to power, under an amnesty promulgated by Lavrentiy Beria (it should be said, that Beria had been complicit in the worst excesses of Stalinism, operating the secret police, runnings the Gulags, and orchestrating purges). Khrushchev further reined in the Gulags, eventually abolishing the Gulag system in 1960--though it should be noted that forced prison labor camps continued to exist to a much diminished degree. As the online Gulag Museum says, by that point, while there were still political prisoners, they actually had to have genuinely oppose the Soviet regime. This isn't to say that Khrushchev, or his Soviet Union were all good, just far better from Stalin and from what is described in this book.
According to the book, Valery became a prisoner in 1956 for a ten year sentence, and he is still a prisoner in 1963 at the start of this book. Given the above changes, that is not believable. His only crime was, apparently, that he had once lived outside of the Soviet Union. Maybe that could have led to an imprisonment under Stalin, but it's not plausible under Khrushchev.
Valery lectures some students on the Gulags (as if information and criticism hadn't become publically available as part of de-Stalnization). When he does, he provides data (that it seems unlikely he would have possessed) ending in 1953. He leaves the reader with the impression that nothing had changed (and it seems likely that Pulley didn't realize this either).
To go back to the afterward, we can consider the story of Zhores Medvedev. Medvedev was the first person who alerted the western public to the Kyshtym disaster, as Pulley says.
Now, 'The Half Life of Valery K' depicts knowledge of the Kyshtym disaster as being limited to those scientists working in the area and a limited committee of high ranking scientists. Medvedev was neither (his expertise was in a field that was only indirectly related) and yet he knew of the disaster. Moreover, when he revealed the disaster in the west, he made clear that the disaster was known among scientists. In fact, it incited a pushback against Khrushchev and the pseudoscience of Trofim Lysenko that Khrushchev backed. In this book, and under Stalin, such pushback may have been unthinkable, but in reality, Khrushchev capitulated and greatly limit Lysenkoism's power reach.
Medvedev was also a dissident whose works were censored but nonetheless circulated underground. This led to his brief 1970 detention in a psychiatric hospital. Such detentions were covered in the book, though they were made out as specifically for less serious 'crimes', and possibly just limited to Lighthouse scientists who spoke carelessly, when they in fact were the answer of a changed time. (This detention actually occured under Brezhnev, who reversed many of Khrushchev's reforms though was far from bringing back Stalin's level of political oppression). Other dissidents merely lost their positions. As to Medvedev, he was soon released because of pressure by scientists and writers and the next year given a new position (though a year later he was allowed to take a position in the UK and then stripped of his citizenship, forcing him into exile). So, what Medvedev faces would likely have been than what Valery would have feared--if this book were accurate.
I could go on because this book is filled by error after error, but I've already written too much. I will just say that nothing that I've looked up hasn't had at least some errors.
Pulley clearly has skill as a writer, but that is not matched by her ability to research. What's truly disappointing is that it's clear that Pulley attempted to research this novel, but again and again she flubbed often plot critical details. I mean, it's reeeeaaaally bad.
I'm going to go over way to may examples, but I'll still with the short discussion of the 'demon core' since it's illustrative of the books pervasive errors. This is plot important quite late in the story, but I can avoid spoilers. According to the book, the so called demon core is a pair of beryllium hemispheres that were placed around a plutonium sphere to test how close to criticality the sphere is.
The first error is that the demon core was actually a specific plutonium sphere. The demon core was so named because it was involved in two separate criticality accidents that killed two different scientists at Los Alamos (and perhaps more people years later, though that's less clear). This core would have been used in a third nuclear bomb had Japan not surrendered. Since it was not detonated, there were experiments to see how far from critical this core was, and one of those involved beryllium hemispheres.
The method involved in that experiment did, as Pulley described, use a screwdriver to keep the hemispheres separate to keep the core below criticality. On the day of the 'criticality accident', the screwdriver slipped, the two hemispheres came fully together, resulting in lethal levels of radiation in the brief moment before the hemispheres were moved apart.
This book states that no one had suggested that this was dangerous. That is false. At the very least, Enrico Fermi had witnessed the experiment and warned against it. Moreover, the experimental protocol was to use shims instead of a screwdriver. (Honestly, a lot of the discussion around the individuals killed was disgusting and disrespectful to their lives, though that is bad taste not research error).
A bigger error--and one that arises throughout this book--is a misunderstanding of what criticality is. In reality, criticality refers to a state when a nuclear reaction is at a steady state level--the kind of level that is desired in a nuclear power reactor, where it has to be carefully controlled. Pulley actually means supercriticality here and elsewhere, where the nuclear reaction speeds up. This distinction may not matter much to lay people, but nuclear scientist characters should not make such errors.
This isn't just an issue of terminology. Pulley also misunderstands the consequences of (super)criticality. She assumes that, should fissile material reach (super)criticality, then a nuclear explosion would occur.
This is wrong. A nuclear explosion is extremely difficult to achieve. Not unless does supercriticality have to be achieved, but the speed of nuclear reaction has to go up incredibly quickly to produce an explosion. In real life, the demon core reached supercriticality during each of the two fatal accidents--but it did not explode. Nuclear weapons need to be carefully set off to create a nuclear explosion. Originally this used a sphere of conventional explosions meticuluosly synchroniced around a sphere of nuclear material. Nuclear weapons have fizzled when that hasn't gone right.
Pulley makes these criticality/nuclear explosion errors on mulitple occasions. She creates fear of gigantic explosions when they could not have happened. For instance, there is concerns that nuclear waste products that have sorted themselves out so there is a layer of plutonium might react with water and lead to a nuclear explosion. The reaction would be bad--creating smaller explosions and clouds of radioactive gas.
Honestly, it seems like Pulley didn't realize that explosions involving nuclear material might not be nuclear explosions.
To step back, some of these errors might have been intentional character errors--though it would be very odd for nuclear scientists to make the errors of scientific facts, but erroneous knowledge of the accidents surrounding the demon core is plausible. Given the frequency of errors in this book, it seems doubtful. But, looking to the afterword, it's clear that the author is making the errors while believing the science (and history, etc) are accurate.
In the afterword, Pulley mentions a paper written by Kabakchi and Putilov and then provides a brief and erroneous summary. The paper is about what caused the Kyshtym disaster that set the stage for this book. I'll get into this book's version of that disaster in a minute. The first error in understanding the paper is that Pulley states that Kabakchi and Putilov used indirect data to determine what happened since direct data was not available. However, the authors themselves said that direct data was available, and that previous scientists had already compared that direct data with indirect data to confirm that the two matched. Pulley says that these two authors 'guessed' that the explosion was down to ammonium nitrate in a storage tank. That possibility is mentioned in this paper, but not as the conclusion of Kabakchi and Putilov, but as a discussion of an earlier paper. Instead, this paper refines the picture established by previous scientists, establishing details/ranges for temperature, explosive power, and so on. Of note, Pulley never goes into the most basic version of what caused the disaster even though it was discussed in this paper. A failure in the cooling system--and the fact that that cooling system was not repaired--led to an explosion.
Now, back to the book's version of the disaster. First, Pulley makes this out to have been a nuclear type explosion (the account is vague, but there are hints such as the electromagnetic pulse). However, the explosion was not a nuclear explosion. It was more like a dirty bomb, with a non-nuclear explosion spreading radioactive material. Pulley also erroneously has the radiation reaching the city of Chelyabinsk--or as stated in the afterword it "caused acute radiation sickness in people as far away as Chelyabinsk". This is false on two grounds. First, the radiation did not reach the city of Chelyabinsk. The winds steered the radiation largely toward the northeast, while Chelyabinsk lay to the south south east. Also, the winds deposited high levels of radioactive material much much further away than Chelyabinsk, just in a relatively thin line (The wikipedia page for the Kyshtym disaster displays a map showing where scientists think the radiation reached, as well as the concentrations of radioactive material).
In fact, due to the winds and the relative position of Chelyabinsk 40 (aka City 40, Lake, etc, now officially named Ozyorsk), the radiation deposited from the explosion was apparently less there than some areas a hundred kilometers away. A considerable amount of radiation did arrive on the shoes of those who worked at the Lighthouse (Mayak). It should said here, that Pulley's novel places Chelyabinsky 40 and the Lighthouse too close. The actual nuclear facility was on the opposite side of a large lake from Chelyabinsk 40, far enough away that it would be close to impossible, if not impossible, to see the reactors from Chelyabinsk 40, even though Valery in one scene point out one of the facilities to residents of Chelyabinsk 40.
The geography is, in general, extremely distorted. Valery points out the nuclear facility after he sees children playing in a river contaminated with nuclear waste. However, while the Techa river was for a time used as a nuclear waste dump, the Techa flows in the opposite direction, away from Chelyabinsk 40. In another example of mixed up geography, Valery first sees signs of radiation damage about 30km from Chelyabinsky 40 when he is being taken by taxi from Sverdlovsk. However, Sverdlovsk is to the north, so Valery would not have traveled through the East Ural Radioactive Trace (unless the taxi driver took a roundabout route). The same section mentions Valery's confusion about the name Chelyabinsk 40, since Chelyabinsk is nowhere near--Valery notes that is was back the way they had come. But that is wrong--Chelyabinsk is to the south south east, more or less the opposite direction from where Valery had come.
One other detail I'll mention here. The disaster is today known as the Kyshtym disaster. It was only named that because Chelyabinsk 40 and Mayak, being secret, did not appear on maps. Kyshtym was the closest town that did appear on the map, but it had nothing to do with the disaster (compare how Ebola virus is named after the Ebola river, which wasn't particularly close to the village where western scientists first encountered it). Pulley misunderstands what Kyshtym is and uses it as another moniker for the facility/community, for instance with a huge poster that says "We are Kyshtym! We are the Shield!"
Enough errors of science (and geography). Onto Soviet society.
Other Goodreads reviews cover a number of issues with Soviet/Russian culture which I will not attempt to repeat. I want instead to focus on this books setting in time--Pulley doesn't reckon with the fact that times change. Much of what comes out in this book would have been plausible if it was set about ten or more years earlier. About ten years before the main action of this book, Joseph Stalin died. Nikita Khrushchev came to power a few months later and steadily brought in greater freedom (at least relatively). I haven't done enough reading to check whether the details of oppression would have been accurate if this book was set under Stalin, but it is clear that it is not accurate for it's actual time period.
Valery begins this book in a Gulag prison, as a political prisoner. However, after Stalin's death, the vast majority of prisoners--including ordinary criminals, were released. That actually took place before Khrushchev came to power, under an amnesty promulgated by Lavrentiy Beria (it should be said, that Beria had been complicit in the worst excesses of Stalinism, operating the secret police, runnings the Gulags, and orchestrating purges). Khrushchev further reined in the Gulags, eventually abolishing the Gulag system in 1960--though it should be noted that forced prison labor camps continued to exist to a much diminished degree. As the online Gulag Museum says, by that point, while there were still political prisoners, they actually had to have genuinely oppose the Soviet regime. This isn't to say that Khrushchev, or his Soviet Union were all good, just far better from Stalin and from what is described in this book.
According to the book, Valery became a prisoner in 1956 for a ten year sentence, and he is still a prisoner in 1963 at the start of this book. Given the above changes, that is not believable. His only crime was, apparently, that he had once lived outside of the Soviet Union. Maybe that could have led to an imprisonment under Stalin, but it's not plausible under Khrushchev.
Valery lectures some students on the Gulags (as if information and criticism hadn't become publically available as part of de-Stalnization). When he does, he provides data (that it seems unlikely he would have possessed) ending in 1953. He leaves the reader with the impression that nothing had changed (and it seems likely that Pulley didn't realize this either).
To go back to the afterward, we can consider the story of Zhores Medvedev. Medvedev was the first person who alerted the western public to the Kyshtym disaster, as Pulley says.
Now, 'The Half Life of Valery K' depicts knowledge of the Kyshtym disaster as being limited to those scientists working in the area and a limited committee of high ranking scientists. Medvedev was neither (his expertise was in a field that was only indirectly related) and yet he knew of the disaster. Moreover, when he revealed the disaster in the west, he made clear that the disaster was known among scientists. In fact, it incited a pushback against Khrushchev and the pseudoscience of Trofim Lysenko that Khrushchev backed. In this book, and under Stalin, such pushback may have been unthinkable, but in reality, Khrushchev capitulated and greatly limit Lysenkoism's power reach.
Medvedev was also a dissident whose works were censored but nonetheless circulated underground. This led to his brief 1970 detention in a psychiatric hospital. Such detentions were covered in the book, though they were made out as specifically for less serious 'crimes', and possibly just limited to Lighthouse scientists who spoke carelessly, when they in fact were the answer of a changed time. (This detention actually occured under Brezhnev, who reversed many of Khrushchev's reforms though was far from bringing back Stalin's level of political oppression). Other dissidents merely lost their positions. As to Medvedev, he was soon released because of pressure by scientists and writers and the next year given a new position (though a year later he was allowed to take a position in the UK and then stripped of his citizenship, forcing him into exile). So, what Medvedev faces would likely have been than what Valery would have feared--if this book were accurate.
I could go on because this book is filled by error after error, but I've already written too much. I will just say that nothing that I've looked up hasn't had at least some errors.
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
challenging
emotional
mysterious
sad
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
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
There is some very beautiful writing in this book, and the author does a solid job of making you feel the emotional bleakness and turmoil of the world it's set in.
As I was reading it, I really enjoyed the descriptions of the science involved. I could easily visualize how it all worked, and because of that it made sense to me. I understood how dangerous and precarious the situations were, which helped me become emotionally invested in the story. HOWEVER… after meeting with my book club I found out that most of the science presented in it was wrong. WRONG!!! I don’t know if the author changed it on purpose to fit the plot or just didn’t understand the research they did. Either way, I lost a lot of respect for the author. If you’re going to use real science in your fiction, you need to present it correctly. Run it by actual professionals before letting your book go to print. The fact that the author also got basic historical details wrong is just baffling.
This is a book that I had considered recommending to friends (with a few caveats), but now I won’t recommend it to anyone. My sympathies to the people with accurate knowledge of the science and history who read this book because it must have been infuriating.
Also what was up with the ending? The last 1% of the story is not the place to introduce new things for the characters to be passionate about. Is the author planning a sequel where Valery and Shenkov travel around the UK destroying the patriarchy and liberating all the housewives? Like some kind of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope adventure?
Honestly I was hoping the lake would explode.
As I was reading it, I really enjoyed the descriptions of the science involved. I could easily visualize how it all worked, and because of that it made sense to me. I understood how dangerous and precarious the situations were, which helped me become emotionally invested in the story. HOWEVER… after meeting with my book club I found out that most of the science presented in it was wrong. WRONG!!! I don’t know if the author changed it on purpose to fit the plot or just didn’t understand the research they did. Either way, I lost a lot of respect for the author. If you’re going to use real science in your fiction, you need to present it correctly. Run it by actual professionals before letting your book go to print. The fact that the author also got basic historical details wrong is just baffling.
This is a book that I had considered recommending to friends (with a few caveats), but now I won’t recommend it to anyone. My sympathies to the people with accurate knowledge of the science and history who read this book because it must have been infuriating.
Also what was up with the ending? The last 1% of the story is not the place to introduce new things for the characters to be passionate about. Is the author planning a sequel where Valery and Shenkov travel around the UK destroying the patriarchy and liberating all the housewives? Like some kind of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope adventure?
Honestly I was hoping the lake would explode.
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
the thing about this book is — it’s so beautifully written, Natasha Pulley’s prose is gorgeous, it’s atmospheric and interesting and Valery and Shenkov are such fascinating protagonists but at the same time, what kept this book from getting five stars is that I finished it wanting more from it. Having read many other books by Pulley, it felt….beat for beat, very similar to her other novels, and Pulley is too good of a writer to not shake things up. And my god, I want more from and for the women in this book.
4 1/2 stars.
I've been trying to figure out how to review this novel for days now. I have a pretty strong background in Russian history, both Soviet and not, and so I kind of feel like I shouldn't have been surprised by anything in this book, but I was. I was gutted, my heart was shredded, I kept saying, "no!" aloud, to the story on the page, not least because Pulley draws her story from true events. Not least because my reading of Soviet history and the genocide perpetrated against the Russian people (to say nothing of everyone else) supports every single awful thing that happens here.
It is a marvel of a book. It is also utterly shattering.
Solzhenitsyn's In The First Circle tells the story of his time in the gulag, and the opening of The Half Life of Valery K reminds me strongly of it. The tone is similar enough to serve as a warning of things to come, and it's also a clue that every word Pulley writes is deliberate. Every line of dialog and every bit of self-censorship is intentional and eventually so ingrained that the characters don't even dare think their concerns, they only circle them allegorically.
It is harrowing.
Somehow Pulley wrangles a (relatively) happy ending out of this journey through horrific moral relativism , and along the way we see her usual themes of iron-willed women, gender dysphoria, and desperation for human connection in settings that literally kill people for seeking it. There's a polyamorous love story between the protagonist and his married male love interest and some wonderful m/f friendship.
The real life setting that inspired the novel is the Mayak complex nuclear waste disaster that took place at Lake Karachai in the late 1950s and its shuttering in the early 1960s. This resulted in a radiation poisoning event 20 times worse than that of Chernobyl.
I had a couple of quibbles, as usual. First, it was weird to me to read Russians using British slang. I get the desire to convey colloquial conversations, but it was distracting. Second, the sex scenes are so oblique as to only exist in hindsight. This is clearly intentional: homosexuality was illegal & people learned from childhood to censor their very thoughts, much less words, when it came to anything that might land one in the Lubyanka. But readers are not actually able to read the author's mind and most people haven't read as much history as I have, so I wish there were more -- words like "texture" or "rhythm" or "pressure" or "strength" in the narrative would have drawn in the outlines while maintaining sufficient terror of discovery.
That said, this was an amazing book. Excruciating at times, and surprisingly literary for historical fiction, but amazing all the same.
Content warnings: mass murder, non-mass murder, child harm, infant harm, animal harm, offscreen atrocity, offscreen atrocity against women, radiation poisoning, gulag conditions, Lubyanka conditions (including torture), trauma, psychological horror.
ARC
I've been trying to figure out how to review this novel for days now. I have a pretty strong background in Russian history, both Soviet and not, and so I kind of feel like I shouldn't have been surprised by anything in this book, but I was. I was gutted, my heart was shredded, I kept saying, "no!" aloud, to the story on the page, not least because Pulley draws her story from true events. Not least because my reading of Soviet history and the genocide perpetrated against the Russian people (to say nothing of everyone else) supports every single awful thing that happens here.
It is a marvel of a book. It is also utterly shattering.
Solzhenitsyn's In The First Circle tells the story of his time in the gulag, and the opening of The Half Life of Valery K reminds me strongly of it. The tone is similar enough to serve as a warning of things to come, and it's also a clue that every word Pulley writes is deliberate. Every line of dialog and every bit of self-censorship is intentional and eventually so ingrained that the characters don't even dare think their concerns, they only circle them allegorically.
It is harrowing.
Somehow Pulley wrangles a (relatively) happy ending out of this journey through horrific moral relativism , and along the way we see her usual themes of iron-willed women, gender dysphoria, and desperation for human connection in settings that literally kill people for seeking it. There's a polyamorous love story between the protagonist and his married male love interest and some wonderful m/f friendship.
The real life setting that inspired the novel is the Mayak complex nuclear waste disaster that took place at Lake Karachai in the late 1950s and its shuttering in the early 1960s. This resulted in a radiation poisoning event 20 times worse than that of Chernobyl.
I had a couple of quibbles, as usual. First, it was weird to me to read Russians using British slang. I get the desire to convey colloquial conversations, but it was distracting. Second, the sex scenes are so oblique as to only exist in hindsight. This is clearly intentional: homosexuality was illegal & people learned from childhood to censor their very thoughts, much less words, when it came to anything that might land one in the Lubyanka. But readers are not actually able to read the author's mind and most people haven't read as much history as I have, so I wish there were more -- words like "texture" or "rhythm" or "pressure" or "strength" in the narrative would have drawn in the outlines while maintaining sufficient terror of discovery.
That said, this was an amazing book. Excruciating at times, and surprisingly literary for historical fiction, but amazing all the same.
Content warnings: mass murder, non-mass murder, child harm, infant harm, animal harm, offscreen atrocity, offscreen atrocity against women, radiation poisoning, gulag conditions, Lubyanka conditions (including torture), trauma, psychological horror.
ARC