I'm with Stewart. Here are my thoughts.
Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
The time is 1953; the place is the Soviet Union. In Moscow, a child dies. Is it an accident or is it murder? The child's family believe it was the latter, but Leo Demidov, a state security officer, is sent to explain to them that, in a socialist paradise, there is no crime and that there could not have been a murder. It was an accident.
However, when Demidov is demoted to the militia, and he and his wife are exiled to the Urals, he comes across a case that is all too similar and, at increased danger to himself, starts to investigate.
Based partly on the murderous career of Andrei Chikatilo, who killed over 60 children while the state refused to acknowledge that such a criminal could exist, Child 44 reads as though an excited schoolboy has discovered just how awful life was in Stalinist Russia and has decided to tell everyone about it. At length. Glorying in as much sadistic detail as possible. And then again in case you missed the point the first time around.
Reading it gives the sensation of being hit around the head repeatedly.
It's not even as though the thriller – and this is supposed to be a thriller – is particularly good. The characters are poorly drawn and are incredibly crass stereotypes. The dialogue is stilted and painful, and the 'coincidence' at the end is so far-fetched as to be risible, while the denouement itself is rushed and the happy ending is, in the context of 450-odd previous pages of unrelenting misery, is a ludicrously false note.
And it's not even original – Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park is an excellent read, chock full of atmosphere (I wanted to race out and buy matjes herrings and vodka as I read it) and which very effectively creates the sense of paranoia and fear in the Soviet Union.
There are also a number of ways in which Demidov can be compared to Cruz Smith's hero, Arkady Renko: both are loyal state officials who get into trouble, lose their positions, are exiled and yet carry on trying to solve a case that the authorities would rather was hushed up or blamed on convenient undesirables.
But as if that wasn't bad enough, Child 44 has somehow made it onto the Booker Prize longlist. How this has happened remains a total mystery, but it does the book no favours at all, making the reader think far more deeply about it than it deserves, simply because you feel that there has to be something that merits the praise that has been heaped on it, plus the Booker longlisting acclaim.
Child 44 is, at best, a mediocre thriller. And that feels like a compliment.
