ArchangelArchangelPresent-day Russia is the setting for the stunning new novel from Robert Harris, author of the number one bestsellers Fatherland and Enigma.
Archangel tells the story of four days in the life of Fluke Kelso, a dissipated, middle-aged former Oxford historian, who is in Moscow to attend a conference on the newly opened Soviet Archives.
One night Kelso is visited in his hotel by an old NKVD officer, a former bodyguard of the secret police, Laventry Beria. The old man claims to have been at Stalin's Dacha on the night had his fatal stroke, and to have helped Beria steal the dictators private papers, among them a notebook.
Kelso decides to use his last morning in Moscow to check out the old man's story. But what starts as an idle inquiry in the Lenin Library soon turns into a murderous chase across night-time Moscow and up to northern Russia - to the vast forests near the White Sea port of Archangel, where the final secrets of Josef Stalin has been hidden for almost half a century.
Archangel combines the imaginative sweep and dark suspense of Fatherland with the meticulous historical detail of Enigma. The rest is Robert Harris's most compelling novel yet.
Robert Harris must have known this book would have to bear comparisons to his previous books, it does so easily. That is not to say it surpasses either, merely that it is of a similar order as them. As the blurb implies it has the hallmarks of a typical chase thriller, such as A Matter of Honour or some work of Clive Cussler's, but it's more than that, though the thriller aspect is well-covered. There is also the historical context, the geographical context, the political context, they all add to it, like they did with the previous books, it was the research, (well at least I would guess so, personally I wouldn't know the words of Stalin's speeches, nor the facts surrounding his death, nor the set-up of your average local division of the Communist Party, but the details given imply that the research was meticulous...) that's what made it work. The authenticity of the book was because you could really feel you were there, there were times when they were in the middle of a forest in the snow, it was many degrees below, and there I was shivering (the fact my room was cold, had absolutely nothing to do with it.
If there were any complaints it would be clichés, I will accept that I have never read about a renegade history professor, extreme history (that could be a great sport...), but the idea of him having a slight drink problem, being of of the best but fallen on hard times, having ex-wives and only really loving the kids, all we really needed was a Head of History, shouting Kelso down for his unlawful methods, and saying that he'd had the University Vice-Chancellor 'chewing his ass off' over this case, and 'I'll give you forty eight hours, before I kick your ass out of the University... you'd never work in academia again'... well anyway you see my point. That excluded it was a great book
Score 9/10
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