Review: From Siberia to Edinburgh

The road to this great novel began in Edinburgh some sixteen years earlier. McFarlane Boils the Sea told of a disillusioned pregnant girl’s search for meaning in the city of AIDS and winebars. Rejected by her entrepreneur boyfriend for a new gay partner, she goes down into alternative and seedy Edinburgh – which might suggest that Meek is working in Irvine Welsh country. Nothing could be more misleading – for Meek’s satire is at once wider and more humane than Welsh’s. There’s a dramatis personae which ranges from silver-haired criminal philanthropist doctor Magnus Bree (whose mission is to remove as many babies as possible from a mad world) to pseudo-Russian Flish, a local who pretends to be foreign to impress redundant shipyard workers with his crackpot schemes, and from a savagely disfunctional family renting out social security short stay cubicles, to the most hilariously rude old shopkeeper ever encountered on the Royal Mile. Meek juxtaposes this social grotesquerie with lyrically beautiful cameo chapter introductions to Edinburgh, with the effect of this juxtapositioning throughout being that of defamiliarisation and surrealisation. There is a kind of Christmas redemption for Laura, who rejects fashionable advice to abort; but this has to be set against our final dark view of Magnus Bree, last seen swimming into the night, towards his death, westwards along the Union Canal.

This first novel showed that Meek was a major new talent, and Last Orders, the short stories which followed in 1992, took his eclectic imagination into even more unsettling territories, with a deeply disturbing combination of social and magic realism. His questioning of the world’s sanity, and of the masks we wear, moved restlessly from stories of banal lives which become zany simply through their exaggeration of human repetitiveness to shocking inversions of normality, as when the Red Dragon regiment of soldiers at the military tattoo climax their show by jumping with crimson wings flapping to their deaths from Edinburgh Castle, or when gravity reverses itself and a puzzled young man wonder from his position on the ceiling whether to go outside (and drop in to the sky with sheep, cows and people) or to play it safe… And however weird the situations in the stories, Meek manages to give them their own strange logic – for example, in ‘Recruitment in Troubled Times’, when an official in the Bureau of Security of the Federated Commonwealth of Scotland, France and Canada is sent to interview the state Torturer with a view to finding a successor – who turns out to be himself. The story is told in a deceptively flat, matter-of-fact way which slyly persuades us that in an alternative universe the Scots had won the battle of Flodden in 1513, so that the English now are the underdogs, and that their torture by Scots is hardly nice but very necessary.

Meek’s next novel, Drivetime, appeared in 1995. By now, having worked as a journalist in Edinburgh, Northampton and Kiev, he was Moscow correspondent for The Guardian, and his creative journey was moving away from Edinburgh and Scotland. The roots were still there, however. Once again the young protagonist, an aimless, failed English student, is from Edinburgh, and once again on a kind of quest for meaning in an unstable world. This novel is pivotal for Meek’s development, I believe. Aimless Alan joins – almost on whim – with Deirdre and Mike to drive to ‘Glasgow Town’ where he thinks people are sharper, cool, and warm. The drive gets sidetracked, however, as they casually go via Biggar to Preston, Northampton, Ghent, Trier, Mulhouse, Salerno, Florence, Padua, Klagenfurt, Budapest, Mukachevo, Lviv, Rivne, Khar’hov, Rostov on Don, Nal’chik, Mineralniye, Vody – and thence to Glasgow. The serendipity of the journey is more than matched by the surrealism of events throughout. The quest is ostensibly for a painted egg, which a weird entrepreneur called MacStrachan from the English village of Little Screvving has promise to pay handsomely for – but behind this lurk darker issues. Alan’s opening encounter in Edinburgh with a lady protesting about social inequality carrying a model theatre ends with the theatre catching fire and falling of a high Edinburgh bridge - and as he travels through Europe he encounters riots and burning theatres, weirdly connected to his earlier meetings. The encounters with authorities on the way are Kafkaesque, parodies of all-too-familiar reality. His friends, and the people he meets, slip in and out of events as in dream. Is Alan in fact mad, and dreaming all this, thus linking this novel with contemporary Scottish fiction which presents horrors imagined from breakdown or hospital bed, as in novels like Lanark, The Bridge, Marabou Stork Nightmares and So I Am Glad? Or are we in an all-too-real nightmare Euro-quest through a demented Europe? The novel does suggest that Alan has been a mental patient, but equally does not destroy the possibility of a real journey, with real insights into the breakdowns of modern society.

By now it was clear that Meek’s talents were moving not just Eastwards, in terms of their restless recognition of the hugeness of European boundaries and character, but inwards, into the confused and dark places of human mind. One must assume, too, that with his work in Russia, his reading and imagination were absorbing the work of European and Russian writers, from Kafka to Colvino, and from Dostoevsky to Hasek and Bulgakov, and that already he has some vision of the hugely ambitious novel which would emerge in 2005. Before that, however, in 2000 he produced a superb collection of stories even more disturbing than Last Orders. The Museum of Doubt takes Meek’s satiric imagination to new extremes. The title story has a bizarre salesman who unfolds a limitless cornucopia of material goods from his impossibly small car, hypnotizing his hearers into orgiastic submission – till he meets the girl who wants none of his goods. The salesman is a hyperbolic representation of our greed for things, and Meek’s achievement here and throughout these stories is to insinuate his irony on the world’s materialism, hypocrisy and fear into his eerie and unsettling impossibilities. Several of these stories deal with the utterly impossible, as in ‘The Queen of the Ukraine’, in which we meet the decadent drag sovereign of that poor country, as he/she sails to New York. The story’s dreamlike shifts between countries, characters and situations of sexual decadence challenge any rational interpretation, till the reader simply accepts the illogic of events, together with a sense of the different corruptions of East and West. This, together with ‘Class Action’ is Meek at his astonishing best. ‘Class Action’ introduces a charismatic corporate lawyer who realises that our modern politics and commerce are actually ruled by Gods who move amongst us (with names which seem uncannily close to names of state departments) and accepts their invitation to go to the underworld to represent the dead and their claims for compensation in the real world. And always in these stories the protagonists are not just grotesque, but sinister. Running throughout the volume, in six related stories, in a kind of distributed novella, are the nasty adventures of Gordon Stanefield, retired company director, who hates and envies his son and covets his girlfriend. He cheats, lies, and confuses his wife with the friend he betrayed; he slides into madness yet unjustly emerges as a hero from the nightclub blaze he actually started. Reality and fantasy shift and merge into each other, but always with Meek’s dark humour and satiric purpose in control.

Discussion of these fictions in an attempt to show how Meek was moving towards his most ambitious work. The People’s Act of Love, for all the originality of its settings, characters and panoramic canvas, can with hindsight be seen as a point of arrival for Meek. The results of his journalism taking him increasingly into Eastern Europe, can also be seen in the earlier work, not just in overtly Slavic stories such as Drivetime or ‘The Queen of Ukraine’, but in the way he mingles nightmare and humour, dream and satire. What the new novel succeeds in doing so well is to combine the themes, tone and satire of the earlier work, with an impressive new range and power drawn from the very different traditions of classic Russian fiction. In the novel’s interweaving of strange moralities and grotesque situations Meek works within his former modes, but the way these are set in a Siberian vastness, with a distant, but still very recognisable, historical setting, is new. Indeed, in a sense this a historical novel, based on actual events following the Great War, with Russia split between Reds and Whites, and civil war breaking up communications so that communities of Eastern Russia are isolated not just by distance and weather, but by human hatreds.

Three main narratives are interwoven. There is that of Samarin, that mysterious, unknowable figure, somewhere between Christ and Judas, who opens the novel, moving alone through snow and pine. His story is a study of the terrorist-idealist, and the reader is left till the end wondering whether he is redeemer or destroyer, psychopath or tormented lover. Then there is the linked story of the tragic love affair of Anna Petrovna, gifted photographer of the masses, and her dashing colonel of hussars, who saves her, marries her, and then deserts her for his masochistic religious beliefs, abandoning her and his son for his sect of so-called angels in an obscure Siberian town. And pulling these two narratives into a central knot is the story of the Czech Legion which was left stranded in Siberia after the war. Part victims of history, part perpetrators of appalling atrocity, executionists of hundreds of villagers, under the psychopathic leadership of Colonel Matula this tattered remnant owe their survival to the fact that they control great tracts of the fragmented Trans-Siberian railway.

From all this something of the enormous scope of the novel can be seen. What such a bald account fails to communicate, however, is the artistry of the telling, as random events – horses cartwheeling to their ghastly deaths into a river from railway carriages on a high viaduct, a tribal shaman and his uncanny prophecies, an escaped prisoner of a concentration camp eating his fellow-escapee, whom he’s brought along specifically for that purpose – begin to interweave to form a mosaic of desolation, brutality, and horror.

Meek’s vision can stand beside Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five in its realisation of the way the attrition of war reduces humans to the level of animals, the fittest only surviving. But this is no recital of endless atrocity. Amidst the atrocities and betrayals lie moments of genuine humanity and absurd humour. At the centre of the novel in this respect is Czech officer, Jewish Josef Mutz, lover of Anna Petrovna, admired by some of his men, the only caring figure they have in their legion, ruled capriciously by their psychotic colonel Matula, who taunts Mutz for his Jewishness, takes his pleasure with whatever women he wants, spares on a whim – and is responsible for the horrific slaughter of the villagers of Staraya Krepost. Mutz is the novel’s moral centre. A more positive version of Hasek’s good soldier Schweik, he is utterly weary of war, and probably the only completely sane person in the hotch-potch of cruelty and senselessness around him. His actions can be read as a kind of genuine people’s act of love, as he eventually leads his tattered remnants out of what has become a kind of absurd limbo, where no-one is guiltless and almost all have lost rational perception.

Against this is the other, more absurd, yet sinister people’s act of love. The once heroic colonel of hussars who rescued his wife-to-be has broken under the stress of war. Despairing of humanity, as simple Balashov he leads now a township sect of so-called angels, who attain this status through renunciation of their sexuality – in the case of men, through performance of the act of love in which they castrate one another. This is seen as absurd by some, like Samarin, as futile and sad by Mutz, and as contemptible by Matula and Balashhov’s wife Anna Petrovna, as an abdication of his duties to herself and her son.

What thus emerges is a colossal study of varieties of delusion of ideals. Outstanding is that Samarin’s apparent political ruthlessness, which reveals itself in his breakdown from implacable purpose in the end as based on his desire for revenge after losing his lover, a fellow-terrorist from his youth who dies in The White Garden, a notorious concentration camp in northern Siberia. It is rivalled however Matula’s more straightforward yet more wicked sadism, or Balashov’s retreat to tortured celibacy, and many other lesser versions amongst Czech troops, local tribes, distant Reds, and far-off Czech politicians. Meek’s grasp of it all is vastly impressive, as he keeps control of complex interweaving of narratives, handling the politics and topography of the times with complete assurance, yet at the same time infusing all with his unique blend of surrealism and realism. And in this great work he ends with a kind of wry affirmation, which I will not spoil by describing. Suffice it to say that Balashov redeems himself quite wonderfully, Mutz wrestles his way through endless trials to lead his mean out of Siberia. He has now a choice – after all, the railway runs to Vladivostok, and from there, rather than return to a stern reception in Prague, a kind of freedom in America beckons… Nothing is sentimental, but justice can be seen to give the possibility of a future to those who have earned it. The end of Meek’s journey from Edinburgh, which for so long found on the way only an unresolved absurdity and surrealism in human affairs, has discovered a kind of grace.

Prof. Douglas Gifford