The Second Circle
Review
OMON RA
by Victor
Pelevin
reviewed by Fin
Keegan
AS RUSSIA SLIDES further into chaos and dissolution (what internal
strife does not achieve sheer loss of heart and conscience seems likely
to) and her miserable people wage war on their neighbours and themselves,
there is little to give observers hope for the Russia of the third millenium,
a nation whose glories, though usually tainted by expansionism and xenophobia,
are now long past and well beyond repeating, even in benevolant forms.
Russia's population is falling, her regrets accumulating and, with persistant
anti-semitism, a parlous economy and a sense of having been duped by History,
she increasingly resembles inter-war Germany. One of the few things to
cheer about is the rude health of her literature, since in Russia books
are still important, though never approaching the state-sponsored print
runs of bygone days or the intense devotion of samizdat literature.
And among young writers none is more accomplished or admired than Victor
Pelevin, whose failure to win the Little Booker in 1999 was greeted with
outrage by the Russian reading public.
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OMON RA
by
Victor Pelevin
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For lovers of the
Russian tradition in fiction Pelevin' work bears welcome echoes of past
glories. But satire is one thing: one picks up Omon Ra (1992, trans.
1994), expecting, such is the hoo-hah, to be entertained. And Pelevin,
possessed of a prodigious imagination, delivers--though satirizing the
lately deceased Communist Utopia is surely akin to shooting fish in the
proverbial barrel. But what one is not prepared for is a satirist of such
evident compassion, a faculty which makes Victor Pelevin indubiatibly
Russian--for his literary countrymen, foreign policy notwithstanding, have
always demonstrated soul, i.e. an emotional imagination all their
own.
Omon Ra treats, not of Russia, but
of the Soviet Union, that creaking hulk of empire that the Russian people,
never ones to do anything by half, projected themselves onto, an ogre puffing
about the globe in an overcoat twice as large as itself, its head stuffed
with notions of world domination and the subjection of History itelf. The
story is told through the eyes of Omon Krivomazov, a young Soviet obsessed
with space exploration, a dream which leads him first to "Rocket Camp"
and later, his willingness to sacrifice his life for the country declared
to his superiors, onto a secret KGB space-training school. The boy's progress
along these ever-narrowing paths takes place in a phantasmagorical atmosphere
of sinister goings-on and weird superiors, a mixture skilfully and hilariously
administered by Pelevin. Gradually it becomes clear that the powers that
be have chosen Omon solely for his stated willingness to die for the space
program. This understood he is inculcated into the mysteries of rocketry
in the Land of the Soviets: their remote lunar lander, or "moonwalker",
for example, conceals a cosmonaut peddling a bicycle and pulling levers
to simulate the activites of onboard computers. Of course such a contraption
has no way of returning from the moon once it is deposited there and so
Omon slowly comes to term with the death sentence that his dream of freedom
has been transformed into.
Pelevin's bent is towards SF and so it is no surprise that he should
be drawn towards the Soviet space program, an enterprise which turned out
to have as much substance as the East German swimming team, and furnished
the dying empire with its last citizen: a Mir cosmonaut who came back to
earth to find his passport invalid and his party card making him a veritable
outlaw.
Born in 1962, Pelevin has grown up in
the successive phases of stagnation, perestroika, and the nerve-jangling
dissolution of both the Eastern Bloc and the USSR itself; his adulthood
to date has been bookended by the equally insane interventions in Afghanistan
and Chechyna (as I write Moscow is pounding the Chechen nation, man, woman
and child, back into the Stone Age, one of the old Union's great southern
cities looks like Hiroshima after the bomb, and young Russian conscripts
stand accused of massacring civilians). David Edgar, writing in a recent
London Review of Books remarked that "often when something petrifies,
it [assumes] its most perfect form". In the case of the pre-modern Comedy
of Manners, he contends, that perfect form was reached in The Importance
of Being Earnest; in the case of the Russian Sense of Humour that final
expression may well be the work of Victor Pelevin.
Fin Keegan
Other reviews by Fin Keegan
at
The Second Circle:
The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Palace of Dreams by Ismail
Kadare
Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin
The "Loire-Atlantique" Cycle by Jean Rouaud
The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
Pereira Declares by Antonio Tabucchi
Justine by Alice
Thompson
Brief Reviews including Donald Antrim and John Lanchester
A Profile of
the Harvill Press
A Profile of
the Editions de Minuit
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