James Walton

Playing Stalin for laughs

Christopher Wilson’s novel The Zoo sends shivers down the spine while bringing a smile to the face

issue 22 July 2017

Christopher Wilson’s new novel is much easier to enjoy than to categorise. And ‘enjoy’ is definitely the right word, even though The Zoo tackles subject matter that should, by rights, make for a punishingly bleak read.

The narrator is 12-year-old Yuri, whose misfortunes start with the fact that he’s growing up in Moscow in 1953 — and that a road accident when he was six damaged his brain, leaving him with a curious set of symptoms that couldn’t be worse suited to life under Stalin: a total lack of guile, a tendency to ask awkward questions and a face so angelically trustworthy that everybody tells him their deepest secrets.

Given that his wife is in a prison camp, Yuri’s father Roman, a professor of veterinary science at Moscow zoo, is understandably worried that the authorities will come for him next — and one night they do.

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