White Blood
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
An epic novel of Russia on the eve of revolution
The son of an English father and a Russian mother, Charlie Doig is a big man -- big in stature and big in spirit. A naturalist, he roughs it around the world collecting birds and insects for museums. In 1914 he is on a mission for the Academy of Sciences in Russian Turkestan when war breaks out. His pay is stopped and his companion goes off to enlist. Doig, however, has no intention of volunteering to be killed. He returns to the Pink House, his family's home near Smolensk, and to the woman he loves, his cousin Elizaveta.
At first the Pink House remains almost untouched by outside events, and the familiar ways continue as before. But imperial Russia is doomed and with it all the old certainties. Trapped by the snow with Doig and Elizaveta are a motley collection of old aristocrats, their servants and hangers-on -- and two soldiers who have sought refuge with them, one of whom, Doig fears, is a Bolshevik out to destroy them all.
Beautifully written, richly imagined, by turns savage and tender, this exhilarating novel confirms James Fleming as one of the very best novelists at work today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this crackling, flamboyant third novel from Ian Fleming's nephew (Thomas Gage), Charlie Doig is the unlikely product of a Scots-Russian union, who lives in his ancestral Smolensk "Pink House" in Russia as the Romanov dynasty wanes. Under the tutelage of German naturalist Hartwig Goetz, Charlie pursues the "holy cause" of Darwinism and captures a rare "bronzy blue-shouldered" bore beetle an omen of an even rarer apprehension, his oft-delayed marriage to comely Cousin Elizaveta. Amid a parade of hilarious secondary characters (including the Mongolian manservant Kobi and the potentate Count Igor Rykov), Charlie wrests Elizaveta from a rival, and the passion of the newlyweds is finally consummated at the novel's climactic midpoint. The appearance, in the winter of 1917, of the cunning Prokhor Glebov, a Bolshevik and the novel's avenging angel, sets up the book's lingering final turn. Charlie recognizes that Marxist rule in Russia will be a bitter corrective interval at best: "Civilization," says Charlie, "... cannot be restored until the possibilities of barbarism have been displayed in their full bestiality." In the book's wintry denouement, Charlie's narration pulls slowly back on events the revolution's settling of scores and literal severing of ties with the czarists and then freezes. It's funny, sad and magical.
