Chekhov’s Mistess

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January 2007

The People’s Act of Love, by James Meek

 

“Could we not say of all such examples that… the monstrous always excites wonder.”

      - Longinus, On the Sublime

While at one of my favorite bookstores, Three Lives and Company, “The People’s Act of Love” came up.
Several of us chimed in enthusiastically and I reminded myself that this was one of the (many) books I never managed to write about last year. So here I attempt amends if for only because I think you will enjoy the book. Last year word got out that Johnny Depp would be bringing The People’s Act of Love to film, which seems both appropriate and daunting. Modern audiences can stomach just about anything, but a book that includes castration and cannibalization might be hard to translate with, er, taste. Nontheless, the book, which was longlisted for the Booker, has a cinematic flair and is well worth reading before the film is released, reportedly in 2009.

Primarily set in the remote Siberian village of Yazyk during the tumultuous years after the 1917 Russian revolution, “The People’s Act of Love” tells the calamitously converging stories of four people: One is Mutz, an officer in a Czech military unit – led by a murderous sociopath – who is caught up in another country’s civil war. Mutz is long overdue for going home and well past believing in the means of his superior. The independent Anna Petrovna (incidentally, the name of a character in Chekhov’s first play, Platonov) is a mysteriously out of place woman whose purpose for living in the town is unknown except for one other person. And then there’s Balashov, leader of an Angelic religious sect who believes the only way to be close to God is to eschew all opportunities for fornication, that is, physically remove the possibility.

All of these characters live in a tense coexistence with their motivations veiled until Sarin arrives, literally walking in from upper Siberia with a man’s severed hand in his pocket. Sarin was a student who lost his youth and the woman he loved to revolution and has set out in the world to deliver the People, he believes, to the truth.  His arrival, which coincides with the death of a Shaman being held captive, is the catalyst for tensions to explode. The novel is built upon these characters and the collision of their individual philosophies.

James Meek, who’s written two other novels and was a foreign correspondent in the Soviet Union during the ‘90s, has researched this book well. He tells us in an afterward that many of the novel’s elements are a matter of historical yet widely unknown fact, which is interesting given their fantastical and violent nature. To tally the many heinous acts in “The People’s Act of Love” – severed hands, toes, scrotum, thumbs, liver, etc. – would seem to me to miss the point, but it’s hard to resist as they add up and we begin to wonder if we’re not at a campfire listening to ghost stories. Closer to the point though, is the moral impetus behind these monstrous acts. It is a time of war and a time of revolution, a time when ugly terrible things become ordinary.

Meek poses questions through his characters: Is love a good reason to kill? Is there a difference between one who kills as a sociopath and one who kills for religion or patriotism, or love? “…Is there any cause which would justify a man butchering and eating his companion in the wilderness?” one character asks, adding, “who raises the companion for that purpose, like a farmer fattening a hog?” Does the question change when “the fate of the world rested” on this man, if he “is the will of the people. He’s the hundred thousand curses they utter every day against their enslavement.”? “To hold such a man,” he continues, “ to the same standards as ordinary men would be strange, like putting wolves on trial for killing elk…”

The other side of that questions is absolute pacifism and here idealistic brutality meets angelic, or perhaps stoic passivity. In this lovely passage, Balashov explains his journey toward God and a new life:

“I walked for hours, trying to be as quiet as possible and trying to move deeper into the forest. It was a warm night. I curled up on a bed of last year’s leaves between two tree roots and went to sleep. I woke up from a nightmare just when it was getting light. I had dreamed the events of the battle…as the shells began to explode I felt as if I was being bitten by some small, vicious animal, from within, as if it was just about to burst through my skin. I stood up with a shout in a pattering of falling leaves and pulled off my vest and ran my hands over my body. There was no new mark, not even a graze. I took off my boots and the rest of my clothes and sat naked on the root, trying to find the wound I was sure was there. I found nothing. In my heart I was not surprised because I did not feel as if I had lost anything, blood or flesh. It felt more as if I had gained something I should not have, which had not been there before. I had seen the best part of the two hundred comrades and their horses cut down like grass in a few minutes, and I had escaped without a cut. I should have been on my knees, for days, thanking God for his mercy. But I did not feel saved. I felt filthy inside, as if my soul would never be clean again, be there ever so much fasting and prayer, and a weight which would never let my soul float free of blind killing.”

When a man who has lived through battle and chosen a monastic life is faced with violence, what does he do? Can he go against the nature of man? Meek opens the book epigraphically with these words of the writer Andrei Platonov: “Busy remaking the world, man forgot to remake himself.” If this quote stands before the book as a challenge of meaning, then where does a man who so wholly and irrevokably remade himself fit? If this were a different novel – perhaps one much longer and written by a Russian – we might emerge with an attempt at more full understanding (which, for something along those lines I point you to Mesa Selimovic’s “Death and the Dervish”), but Meek stops short trying to answer these questions. Maybe the demands of the story, or an editor, left ideas on the cutting room floor. Still, that is only a qualm with what the book could be and not with what it is, which is an enjoyable, even if horific and dismal, story written in fluid prose. If its gruesomeness pulls us in, the moral complexity of the characters is what makes the story memorable. As testament, I’ll say that I wrote this piece a full year after reading the book, having but a few notes. Much of the story and characters are as vivid in my mind today as they were when I read the book last year.

• posted by Bud Parr
• 18-Jan-2007
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