BOOKS OF THE YEAR
BOOK OF THE DAY
Good Citizens Need Not Fear by Maria Reva review – an enthralling debut
From absurdity to horror, interlinked short stories explore life in a police state for the inhabitants of a block of flats in 1980s Ukraine
Thu 11 Jun 2020 09.05 BST
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As a result of experiencing quarantine, many will viscerally empathise with a character called Smena in the story of female friendship and hardship, “Bone Music”. Smena self-isolates for a year and nearly starves out of fear in the face of change: the old order is crumbling, nothing is solid under her feet. Her town “now felt like a death trap, but she convinced herself that the concrete walls of her own apartment were secure”. Meanwhile, her neighbour who is dying of a brain tumour won’t visit the hospital because “the nurse said if they exceed the quota, they get investigated, and if they get investigated, it’s worse for all of us”. The quotas are fictitious. As the old Soviet joke went: we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.
The statement of the title, Good Citizens Need Not Fear, already containing its own untruth, sets the tone for the opening story “Novostroïka” (“new build” – and in the time-honoured Soviet style, new builds begin to collapse the day after their completion). “Novostroïka” feels a little too familiar, with its Gogol-like portrait of institutionalised absurdity. There is a noble Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet narrative tradition in which good citizens are caught up in Kafkaesque trials. Here too bureaucracy and brutality meet in a clerk sitting behind a glass screen, who informs the protagonist that his building with the broken-down heating does not exist.
It’s a usefully gentle beginning, though. The following story introduces the central tragic character of the book, and the mood darkens rapidly into a sense of pervasive horror that never quite lifts, even when satire and slapstick return in stories such as “Roach Brooch” and “Lucky Toss”. And what better setting for a horror story than an “internat”? The “internati” were a type of penal colony where youths rejected by the system were sent. This is where Zaya ends up, having been abandoned by her parents for her cleft lip – totalitarian systems banish difference from birth. This internat is housed in a monastery whose monks were executed by the Bolsheviks. But traces remain in the frescoed walls, and secrets lurk in the basements: nothing can be completely erased in Reva’s provincial Ukraine. Protagonists reappear, relationships change, and this is where the pleasure of the nested-doll narrative kicks in: the characters’ lives weave into a novelistic universe full of outlandish yet inevitable metamorphoses.
This book takes us into the secret recesses of a plague, for that is what a police state is; no one can escape the mental pestilence, even if some escape the physical one. Fake news is as old as tyranny. What is it like, these stories ask, to live in a culture of lies, of authorised cruelty, of material privation and emotional repression, and always with the suspicion that your neighbours have been infected? Apartment block number 1933 houses the collective psyche of that long-suffering creature, “homo sovieticus”, but it is also a microcosm of humanity locked in a state of deficit and anguish, rumours and disappearances. In the Soviet world, the quarantine lasted for half a century. Coming out of it has taken 30 years and normality hasn’t been restored. It wasn’t there in the first place.
This is where the second part of the book travels to – the blank slate of 1989-90, as the block’s denizens find themselves in freefall. Anything is possible and nothing is real. The collapse of the old system takes down statues of Lenin, careers, marriages, savings and certainties. But “after three generations, who were the victims, who the villains? We’d become a formidable alloy, bound by shame.”
In an emblematic scene, Zaya returns to the internat with some newly rich Russians who seek thrilling experiences, Chernobyl-style; they jump into one of the open pits once dug as a child’s grave. Zaya picks up a shovel. In this criminally unequal world, there are those who have nothing and those who have so much they think the nothing can be commodified – exactly how things were in the time leading up to the Bolshevik revolution, which birthed the devastation of Ukraine and of all the other republics assimilated by the Soviets, the internat, the surveillance state. “Zaya considers. She can fill the pit, finish them all off.”
Reva does not shy from the grotesque, but she is too subtle and humane a writer to slip into facile resolutions. In a post-internat society, she suggests, neither normality nor innocence is possible. But transformation is – and your salvation, like your nemesis, may take an unlikely form.
• Good Citizens Need Not Fear is published by Virago (RRP £14.99).
Maria
Reva
Maria Reva is a writer and opera librettist. She has an MFA in fiction from the Michener Center at the University of Texas. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories in 2017 and 2019, McSweeny's, The Journey Prize Stories, and Granta. In 2019, Reva won the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers for her short story “The Ermine Coat.” Born in Ukraine and raised in Vancouver, she currently lives in Austin, Texas.
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