Back in mid-November, I noted that Eduard Verkin’s
Остров Сахалин (
Sakhalin Island)
was confounding me – a month later, with the
passage of time, I can’t say I see things much differently.
Sakhalin Island is
imaginative, action-packed (much of the time), and absorbing, though on a
structural level it’s an unholy mess, with an uneasy blend of genres, tropes,
motifs, characters, disasters, and just about everything else. Of course I’m more
than capable of enjoying and even loving overstuffed books that I describe with terms
like “diabolical” and “unholy mess,” so I’m not surprised I never considered abandoning
Verkin’s
Sakhalin, though the book is
trying my meager patience today, as I attempt to mentally list the many plot
threads running through the book. And, oops, I didn’t pull nearly hard enough
on a key plot thread, the one I found least interesting. Underrating that story line resulted in my
feeling a bit lost when I reached the twist-and-everything-changes ending and
came up short on meaning. (The twist ending, by the way, reminded me of another
island novel, Dennis Lehane’s
Shutter Island,
which also rankled.) I won’t reveal the twist in
Sakhalin Island but I will include some minor spoilers in my
descriptions of the book.
 |
| Yuzho-Sakhalinsk, a favorite place. |
So what did I catch and what did I miss? Well, in this world
after nuclear war (North Korea started it, the U.S. responded, horror ensued),
Japan is the world’s remaining bastion of relative calm and industrialization,
and beautiful Sakhalin Island essentially serves as a combination of buffer zone and giant
refugee and prison camp. Population: around twenty million. A young woman named
Lilac, a student of applied futurology who lives in Japan and is part Russian
and part Japanese, travels to Sakhalin to have a look around. She’s armed with
pistols, prepared to visit prisons, and planning to somehow learn something
about the future, based on the past and present. (Confession: applied futurology
and Lilac’s instructions from and discussions of her professor are the plot thread
I should have paid more attention to.) Most of the book is told in Lilac’s
first-person narrative; her voice is calm, assured, and generally logical, even
after she’s begun using those pistols. Seeing that Verkin’s book follows in Chekhov’s
Sakhalin Island tracks – many of the same
prisons are mentioned and at least
one
reviewer has noticed similar wording in the two books – it’s only fitting
that guns will be fired. Since the island is dangerous, Lilac is assigned a fellow
traveler and body guard, Artyom, who is from the “chained to a hook” caste – he
carries a large and very lethal weapon. (Verkin also borrows “chained to…” from
Chekhov’s
findings.)
During their travels together – which begin on a rather luxurious
train and end in a stolen boat, with a lot of walking in between – Lilac and Artyom
meet some curious figures, including an inmate Lilac remembers hearing at a
poetry reading when she was younger, a crawling radical vegan who’s likened to
an insect, and a little boy with albinism who has had his tongue and digits
removed. Lilac and Artyom take the boy with them on their journey. Verkin also
offers up disturbing race-related incidents, descriptions of crazy-making prison
architecture, and accounts of what happens to corpses. Though these episodes,
many of which are very odd, are important to the story, there’s often too much
background information, slowing the pace in a book where seismic activity is
most important because it triggers the arrival of a human-made disease known as
mobile rabies, MOB, which puts victims into a zombified state that lasts implausibly
long.
So, yes, the earthquakes are crucial here, which is why I mentioned
“apocalypse” in my title. Not only does earthquake damage release prisoners (including
the poet) from jail, it also enables MOB’s zombified (I love that word) victims
to cross from the mainland to Sakhalin – on a side note, MOBsters have hydrophobia
and avoid stairs, too, which can make retreat easy for the healthy. And so Lilac,
Artyom, and the boy are running from rioting prisoners, the MOB ill, and crews
they’re sure will come to clean things up after an invasion of zombified MOBsters.
If all this sounds like a bit (or a lot) too much, you’re right, it is. And this
isn’t the half of it. Even so (or maybe “thus”?), Sakhalin Island got under my skin and by its end, after mentions of
an Edenic garden, earthquakes, hellfire, purification, and a second coming, not to mention a unicorn, Sakhalin brought me back to the Bible, to
my beloved Book of Revelation. It also brought me to thoughts of innocence (and
its loss) among the orphaned – including the maimed boy as well as other children
and even adults, including Artyom – plus prisoners, and even Lilac, whose name
is so fresh and springy, who wears a protective inherited mackintosh for most
of the book, and who almost seems to become a trained assassin. An imperturbable
one, too, and no wonder, since danger always lurks and, as a doctor tells her, “Sakhalin
is fear. We’re afraid.”
Verkin achieves a lot with Sakhalin Island and my emotions loved it, thanks to my fascination with
the Book of Revelation, the very concept of incarceration on an island, the
poet (he’s a key figure, pull that thread if you read the book), the various
figures chained to objects, the heavy debt to Chekhov (whose Sakhalin I haven’t read but paged through
quite a bit), the MOBster zombies who shrink from the stairs our heroes conveniently
manage to find, and the awfulness of a world with so much death, doom, destruction,
and roasted rat meat. None of that will let me go and, good gracious, part of
me wants to reread the book to decipher it. My brain, though, wishes Verkin’s editors
hadn’t deserted him: despite her vividness, Lilac’s many prison visits and
observations start feeling repetitious and many scenes could have been pared
down, while other aspects of the book, like the Japanese poet, the “chained to…”
figures, and the relationships between characters felt like they could and
should have been given more attention. I realize that Lilac – a social
scientist who’s ostensibly writing a trip report but may well be the ultimate
unreliable narrator – probably didn’t have enough spare time or emotional
energy to take much of that down (even mentally) while escaping earthquakes, riots,
and a killer clean-up crew, but a little more balance from Lilac would have meant
a better work of fiction for Verkin. I also admit to a bias against being
presented with big twists in epilogues – I tend to see them as manipulative. But
damn that Verkin, who’s packed so much into this book that I still can’t stop
thinking about it, which is, I suppose, a sign that something worked pretty well
in Sakhalin Island if the manipulative epilogue trick sucked me in this time around.
Up next: Alisa
Ganieva’s Offended Sensibilities and Ludmilla
Petrushevskaya’s Kidnapped. The History
of Crimes. Plus a trip report from the ASEEES/Slavist convention, which was ridiculously
fun, and a list of translations that came out this year. I’m still taking entries
for the list so translators and publishers, please send me a note if you have something
to report.
Disclaimers: The
usual. I received a copy of
Sakhalin Island
from Verkin’s literary agency,
BGS, with whom I often converse and sometimes collaborate, and whose authors I often seem to translate.
Photo credit: btibbets, via Wikipedia.