Archangel by Robert Harris, Hutchinson, 421pp, £16.99 in UK
Someone once described Robert Harris as "the Fred Astaire of thriller writers". It was an apt metaphor, for Harris is an elegant, nimble, fluent and persuasive writer. Archangel is the final book of the trilogy which marked his metamorphosis from talented political journalist to accomplished author of sophisticated thrillers. In Fatherland he postulated a world in which Germany won the last war (and Joe Kennedy became US President). In Enigma he recreated the frenetic hothouse of Bletchley Park, the British code-breaking establishment which decrypted some of the Nazis' top secrets. Now, in Archangel, he turns his attention to contemporary Russia and the sordid secrets of its totalitarian past. The central character, Fluke Kelso, is a dyspeptic, middle-aged former Oxford historian with an elegant literary style and a nice line in cynicism. He goes to Moscow to attend a conference on the newly opened Soviet archives, gives a lecture and is visited by a mysterious member of the audience who turns out to be a former bodyguard of Beria, the infamous head of Stalin's secret police, the NKVD.
The old man claims to have been at Stalin's dacha the night he died, and to have helped Beria steal a secret notebook belonging to the dying dictator. The implication is that he knows where this sensational document can be found, but he disappears before Kelso can question him further. It's a come-on, of course, but the historian is hooked. The novel then chronicles the next three frantic days of Kelso's life, as he follows this trail deep into the psychic heart of the old Soviet system. It leads, appropriately enough, across the frozen wastes of Northern Russia, to the port which gives the book its title. Kelso is joined in his quest by an unscrupulous journalist named O'Brian, and pursued by Boris Yeltsin's equivalent of the KGB. There is a bloody denouement, lots of suspense, some genuinely creepy moments and a neat twist in the tail - all in all, a neatly-turned piece of work. What makes Harris stand out from the herd of airport novelists is a certain cerebral fastidiousness. His thrillers are about the power of ideas to move people to great or terrible deeds. His heroes tend to be thoughtful, flawed outsiders with tortured personal lives. There is a great deal of history, lightly expounded, no gratuitous violence and virtually no sex. What keeps one turning the page is the ingenuity of the plot and the remarkable circumstantial detail.
As a journalist, Harris was famous for meticulous research. (American magazine editors recognise him as one of the few British journalists to defeat their remorseless fact-checkers.) Not surprisingly, therefore, Archangel is a vivid evocation of the bleak chaos of contemporary Russia, where gangster capitalism rules, the rule of law is non-existent and huge swathes of the populace are so disillusioned that they yearn for the good old bad old days. It is also a sobering evocation of the horrors of those days. And there is a delicious irony in the fact that the goons who stalk Kelso as he pursues Stalin's notebook are more alert to the risks of unearthing such an inflammatory icon than is the distinguished historian. The scholar thinks that history never repeats itself; but they know that it can.
John Naughton is a columnist on the London Observer and a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge