Archangel
by Paul Watkins
Present-day Russia is the setting for this stunning new novel from Robert Harris, author of the 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 room by an old NKVD officer, a former bodyguard of the secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria. The old man claims to have been at Stalin's dacha on the night Stalin had his fatal stroke, and to have helped Beria steal the dictator's 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 nighttime Moscow and up to northern Russia--to the vast forests near the White Sea port of Archangel, where the final secret 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 result is Robert Harris's most compelling novel yet. From the Hardcover edition.From Library JournalWatkins, a gifted young novelist who stands head and shoulders above his more popular but less capable peers (e.g., Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, Douglas Coupland), most recently raised readers' eyebrows with his fascinating memoir, Stand Before Your God (LJ 11/15/93). In this return to fiction, the thinly veiled title character, Adam Gabriel, returns to his hometown in Maine to battle Jonah Mackenzie, a ruthless logging baron who is destroying the wilderness. Gabriel proves as single-minded as Mackenzie, however, and engages in dangerous "tree-spiking" (i.e., driving long nails into trees in order to discourage chainsaw-bearing loggers). When the dust clears, four men are dead. Unfortunately, the devices that worked so well in Watkins's other novels?idealistic, romantic characters; exotic settings; tight, affecting prose?fall flat here. Female characters in particular, most notably an unstable local woman known as "Mary the Clock," are poorly sketched. Archangel is not up to the author's usual standards, and unless Watkins has a following at your library you can pass on this one.?Mark Annichiarico, "Library Journal"Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. From BooklistWatkins chooses demanding themes, such as the portrayal of an SS trooper or, as in his last novel The Promise of Light (1992), the struggle for Irish independence. Here, in this riveting and shatteringly lyrical tale, he enters the realm of environmental issues. Jonah Mackenzie, the mill owner in a tiny logging town in northern Maine, is a ruthless man hell-bent on carrying out a vendetta against the forest that claimed one of his legs. He has purchased logging rights to a designated wilderness area and is determined to cut down as many old-growth trees as possible in the little time allotted. He drives his crews to the breaking point, even after a man dies. Mackenzie effects a cover-up, but forces conspire against him. There's courageous Madeline and her pro-environmental newspaper, the Forest Sentinel; an eco-warrior named Gabriel who is busy sabotaging logging operations; Mackenzie's increasingly guilt-ridden foreman; and even his wife. Watkins adeptly orchestrates a thoroughly believable escalation of tension, madness, and violence, all conveyed with bone-chilling accuracy. As taut and expressive as a violin string, this is an outstandingly intelligent and significant novel. Donna Seaman