The Siberian-born novelist Andreï Makine has, as we say in the book world, a shedload of French literary bling. He’s the only writer to win the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis for a single novel (Le Testament Français) which is, in pop cultural terms, like winning The Great British Bake Off and Strictly on the same day. So one imagines that when old Andreï sat down to write this one, he enjoined himself not to cock it up.
Reader, he hasn’t. One hesitates to use the word ‘masterful’, but for The Archipelago of Another Life it feels warranted. Set largely in 1950s USSR, Makine’s novel tells the story of Pavel Gartsev, a reluctant Red Army reservist tasked with hunting down an escaped convict in the Siberian forests. With him are a cross-section of the regime: Luskas, a vicious communist apparatchik; Ratinsky, a dangerous young officer; Butov, a Falstaffian major, notionally in charge; and Vassin, a decent sergeant, weary from a life of tragedy.
This manhunt is a self-described Western, and there are structural elements of the genre: a posse of misfits, a mysterious outlaw, a high-pressure pursuit — even moonshine by campfires and a dead gold prospector.
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