Child 44

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

Category: Novel Grade: A-

It's usually tough to try to mix genres in a single book. Smith isn't quite sure what he wants this book to be - political commentary on 1950s USSR? murder mystery? love story? the next Silence of the Lambs? Surprisingly, for reasons I can't quite figure out, the mishmash works. Smith has produced a real page-turner.

Ultimately, this book is mostly about life under a totalitarian regime - the Soviet Union of the 1950s. It's really pretty terrifying to watch people try to live a normal life when every utterance could be a crime against the state; when to be accused was to be convicted. With power given to some of the worst elements of society, arbitrariness and personal vendettas are played out in scenes of torture and roundups. Our hero is a secret police agent who is slapped in the face by the fact that his latest arrest is so clearly innocent of the crimes with which he is charged. This makes him question all of the people he has sent to their deaths or the Gulags in his career. Once he loses the view that the state is infallible, his life slowly crumbles.

The framework that we're given around which the action pivots is a string of murders of children. Each individual murder is "solved" by pinning the blame on a convenient "degenerate" chosen from the ranks of local homosexuals and, occasionally, mentally ill, but usually harmless folks. Officially, of course, the Communist regime has solved societies problems so crimes, other than crimes against the state, no longer exist. To look for patterns that might point to brutal murder is to question the effectiveness of the state and is, therefore, a crime itself. So this long, horrible string of murders (look to the book's title to see how bad) continues.

The book definitely has some weaknesses as you'd expect from a first novel. The ending is pretty weak being dependent on pretty silly coincidences. The author also has a tendency to switch perspective between paragraphs which can get annoying at times. These flaws aside, the book holds up well. I'll definitely give Smith a second chance when his next book comes out.