The Clay Machine-Gun. By Victor Pelevin, translated by Andrew Bromfield. Faber & Harbord, 335pp, £9.99 in UK
Hailed by Glast, the Russian Granta, as the wonder-boy of that country's new fiction, Victor Pelevin - on the strength of some short stories, a dazzling novella The Yellow Arrow (1993), Omon Ra (1992), which takes a satirical and irreverent look at the Soviet space programme, and an inventive parable, The Life of Insects (1995) - has already proven he is a gifted original writing in a great tradition. This magical and wry new work, his first full-length novel, not only justifies the praise he has received - it confirms a new maturity.
In fact, with The Clay Machine-Gun (Chapaev i Pustola), Pelevin - who was born in 1962 and spent his childhood in Brezhnev's Russia - has shaped a colourful work which not only takes late 20th-century Russian fiction that much-needed step beyond Bitov's classic, The Pushkin House, but also defers to the great tradition begun so much earlier by Pushkin, and later Gogol, arriving at the complex achievement of Bulgakov and Platonov. Satire has long been central to Russian writing, as has the magnificent black humour born of hysteria and despair. During the years of silence, this was kept alive by such writers of the "lost generation" as Evgeny Popov, whose hilarious spoof, The Soul of a Patriot, delighted German reviewers before it was finally published in Russia in 1989, while the English translation was equally well received in 1994. Pelevin is another master of the absurd. In The Yellow Arrow, a packed train is a metaphor for Soviet life. But there is also a philosophical dimension to his fiction which contains many lyric passages. Even when the comedy is at its sharpest, it is never vicious - there are flashes of a longing for something more real, more honest. "Idiots", whispers the hapless Pyotr Voyd, poet, dreamer and narrator of The Clay Machine-Gun, while "tears of helpless hatred for the world" well up in his eyes. "My God, the idiots. . . not even idiots - mere shadows of idiots. . . Shadows in the darkness."
As in his previous work, Pelevin's approach to depicting reality is based on evoking a realistic unreality. In Omon Ra, the cosmonaut never leaves Earth. Narrative does not necessarily have to be constrained by time or logistics. Though previously awarded Russia's "Little Booker" for his short stories, Pelevin's exclusion from the Russian Booker shortlist caused a major literary controversy. In a statement, the jury chairman announced: "It's just too dangerous to support or transmit this kind of cultural image. . . In the cultural space, works like this act like a computer virus - they destroy the cultural memory."
Even allowing for the pressure the jury must have felt itself to be under, it is a weak defence. If anything, the novel - which has already sold more than 200,000 copies in Russia - consolidates the exact sense of the country that Russian writers have been presenting for almost 200 years. This is a very modern novel, playing with technique, narrative structure, time-scale and logic itself, but its ruling motifs are Russia's literature, history and powerful, if battered, sense of self. As early as the second paragraph, there is a reference to the bronze Pushkin "looking a little sadder than usual." Stalin remains a puzzle.
Pyotr Voyd - the name is significant, given that part of Pelevin's thesis is concerned with emptiness and nothingness - returns to St Petersburg after a two-year absence and, alert to "the peculiar gloom which somehow manages to infiltrate the very daylight", meets up with Vorblei, a former schoolmate, now dressed in black leather, armed with a Mauser and "clutching a ridiculous kind of obstetrician's bag." Vorblei, a one-time poet with a cocaine habit, appears to have thrown in his lot with the Cheka, and within moments of inviting our hero to his home reveals he has plans for him. "To this day I do not understand how he failed to shoot me", reports Pyotr before describing the death of Vorblei at his hands.
Not that Pyotr is a natural killer: "It was time to think about how I would spend the evening. I went back into the corridor and glanced doubtfully at Vorblei's leather jacket, but there was nothing else. Despite the daring nature of several of my literary experiments, I was still not enough of a decadent to put on a coat which had now become a shroud and, moreover, had a bullet hole in its back."
Pyotr's day soon becomes a variation of Crime and Punishment and the novel itself has its echoes of Dostoyevsky. Pelevin has been well served by his translator, who catches the tone of polite bewilderment evident in many of the narrator's asides. Not that Pyotr is a wimp. On meeting a Cheka heavy, he observes: "For a moment Barbolin's face reflected one of those feelings that nineteenth-century Russian artists loved to depict when they were creating national types - the feeling that somewhere out there is a wide and wonderful world, filled with amazing and attractive things. . . "
Later in a Cheka jail Pyotr discovers a thick padding on the stone walls and floor of his cell, "which meant that romantic suicide in the spirit of Dumas (`one more step, milord, and I dash my brains against the wall') was quite out of the question."
In time-honoured fashion, the narrator is soon being treated as insane and is asked by a psychiatrist, "Well, well, Pyotr, my lad. How did you manage to get yourself into such a mess?" The narrator's treatment partly consists of reliving in extensive detail some extremely bizarre dreams. These sequences provide the alternate narrative in which our hero returns to the years of the civil war. Pelevin draws upon the experiences of a real-life Red Army hero, Vasily Chapaev. The drug-induced fantasies of the psychiatric patients are juxtaposed with the wartime episodes. Even at its craziest, however, Pelevin's calmly chaotic narrative always makes sense.
Midway through The Life of Insects, a dialogue takes place. "Is this how you live? When was the last time you drank fresh blood?" "Yesterday", replies the other, admitting to drinking medical samples. "From a glass! What kind of mosquito are you? What would your father say if he could see you?" Archibald replies apologetically, "You mustn't forget my mother was a ladybird, and my father was a cockroach. I've no idea what I am". When asked how this affects him, Archibald considers the question. "Not knowing who I am?. . . I don't know. I think I like it. It makes for a quiet life. Of course, when I was young, I didn't think I would end up like this. I always thought I was going to step through a doorway into something astonishing, something new. . . "
A similar meditative quality graces this novel, through which that uniquely Russian feel for history, humour, life and pain swaggers with an ease approaching genius.
Eileen Battersby is an Irish Times journalist and critic
