Andrey Kurkov’s latest novel to be translated into English, The Silver Bone, begins in dramatic fashion. Its hero, Samson Kolechko, is walking in the streets of revolutionary Kyiv. It is the spring of 1919. Suddenly, two Russian Cossacks appear. They chop off his ear with a sabre before riding off. “Hot blood poured down his cheek and seeped under his collar,” Kurkov writes. Samson’s unfortunate father is cut down and killed.
The severed right ear – recovered and placed in a tin – plays a central role in Kurkov’s surreal and wildly enjoyable story. Although no longer attached to its owner’s head, it hears things. Samson can listen remotely to the conversations of two Red Army soldiers who billet in his home. He is an electrical engineering student, but becomes a detective. The ear is an ingenious investigative tool he can use to solve riddles and shaggy plots.
The Silver Bone, longlisted for the International Booker prize last week, is the first volume in a new crime series by Kurkov – Ukraine’s best-known writer – called the Kyiv mysteries. They take place just over a century ago during the Russian civil war. It was a period of great turmoil, when governments came and went as rapidly “as the English weather”, as one character puts it. Bolsheviks, Whites and Ukrainian nationalists all vie for control of the Ukrainian capital.
There are obvious similarities with today, following Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion. Then as now, citizens grapple with uncertainty, randomness and acts of terrible violence. Moscow is trying to swallow Kyiv. Kurkov’s protagonists – Samson and his future fiancee, Nadezhda – are wonderfully engaging. The daughter of a KGB general gave Kurkov a cache of early secret police files. These historical records inspired the book.
A second Kyiv mystery, The Heart Is Not Meat, will appear next year, published by MacLehose Press. Kurkov was working on a third instalment, The Public Sauna Case, when Russian tanks streamed across Ukraine’s borders. For two years he wrote only journalism: a diary of the war and articles for international publications. Recently he returned to fiction. He is writing again in his dacha outside Kyiv.
The Silver Bone is a glorious aural portrait of a city in dangerous flux. It is a place of noisy cobbled streets, horse-drawn cabs and early signs of modernity such as trams and Soviet cafeterias, where diners slurp on bowls of buckwheat soup. “Resonant crows” caw in the trees. There are shootouts on the capital’s most famous street, Andrew’s Descent. Bullets echo into the night, one buzzing “like a tiny mosquito”.
The tone is consistently droll. Samson, an atheist, finds himself working at a communist police station after telling its sleep-deprived commissar: “I sympathise with you.” This is wrongly understood to mean he supports the new workers’ state as it wrestles with disorder. Samson begins by investigating the stolen goods dumped by the two soldiers in his hallway. Among them are patterns for a striped brown and black suit.
This curiously sized outfit and other period objects help to drive Kurkov’s rattling plot along. Samson discovers a wider conspiracy involving a mysterious foreigner and the silver bone of the novel’s title. Along the way are several murders, an uprising by prisoners, and Samson’s gently unfolding romance with Nadezhda, who works in the Soviet bureau of statistics. An idealist, she hopes for a better future.
The novel may be playful, but it poses fundamental questions at a time when bloody conflict has engulfed Europe again. How, in extreme situations, do you act morally? And is it possible to behave decently, when faced with lawlessness and evil? One answer, Kurkov suggests, is the human heart. Love and companionship can flourish amid darkness. Also important, he implies, are good methods and sharp thinking. I finished The Silver Bone wishing to read more.
Luke Harding’s Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival, shortlisted for the Orwell prize, is published by Guardian Faber
The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov (translated by Boris Dralyuk) is published by MacLehose Press (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
