It’s the early twentieth century, and a young woman named Temerity West is working as an agent for the British imperial government. A young man, Kostya Nikto, is an NKVD officer under Stalin. In Constant Nobody, the award-winning novel from Canadian writer Michelle Butler Hallett, these two characters’ lives intertwine in unexpected ways that are both gentle and brutal, sometimes at once.
The story begins with Temerity and Kostya in the Basque region of Spain, where she is masquerading as a nurse and he as a journalist. She treats him for a bad toe; he spares her life when political loyalty dictates he should kill her. From there, the story moves to Moscow in 1937, the year of Stalin’s Great Purge, one of the most violent and repressive events in modern history.
Not surprisingly, dread and dislocation run through the book. The omnipresent unease evokes the Zeitgeist while capturing the characters’ particular and personal experiences. Butler Hallett weaves setting and story together so seamlessly they can hardly be considered as separate elements. Narratively, the increasingly apparent cracks in both the British and Soviet systems parallel the psychological cracks that Temerity and Kostya develop in response to their circumstances.
The book is gritty and often dark. How could it not be? Yet it is rich with humour, as when Temerity repeatedly struggles to make tea with a samovar instead of a teapot, a most English problem. Even in these moments, however, the background of totalitarianism and the constant threat of discovery, torture, and execution tend to turn mundane mistakes into matters of life and death. Any sign of otherness, disagreement, or discontent can lead to imprisonment or worse. In divergent but overlapping ways, Temerity and Kostya suffer from this situation. Small details matter. The self must be tucked away. The laughs are gallows humour.
For readers unfamiliar with the history, Butler Hallett drops in enough context to make the characters’ day-to-day lives understandable on a visceral level, rather than through heavy sociopolitical explication. She uses fairy tales to convey the near-surreality of the situation and she contrasts childhood dreams with the stark realities of adult life under such circumstances. The author’s excellent and unobtrusive prose conjures a fully imagined setting. The reader may not always know exactly what’s happening in the broader world, but this is absolutely appropriate, for the characters don’t know either. Like everyone, they can only experience their own lives, and they behave accordingly.
Along with darkness and humour, readers get a healthy dollop of hope and even love in a variety of guises. There are no heroes in this story, but there are no real villains, either. Some people are more at ease justifying horrendous acts than others, like in real life. Most of the time, there is no obvious right choice, or even a reasonably good option.
From Kostya and Temerity’s first meeting, these dilemmas abound. Both undercover, Kostya meets Temerity in a makeshift hospital in Spain. He is looking for the doctor for political reasons, not medical ones, but his bad toe gives him an excuse to ask her about Cristobal, whose return is a matter of urgent concern:
— I really need to see the doctor. When will he be here?
How to answer? Lie and say Cristobal might be days yet, in the hope this Russian might give up and leave? A journalist might not waste time. An NKVD agent, however, would wait. Tell the truth and risk giving useful information, say she expected Cristobal tomorrow morning on his bicycle, again in the hope the Russian might get tired and leave? No. A journalist with dizzy spells and a sore foot would not want to leave, knowing the doctor would return soon, and neither would an NKVD agent. Back to lying…
Blasted blasted bloody hell. — I expect him back tomorrow morning.
By miring her characters in such moments of impossible decision-making, Butler Hallett invites readers to stretch intellectually and morally. She does this so well that the convoluted reasoning of her characters makes sense even when it serves heinous causes. The book asks what it means to live in the service of a nation-state versus as a private citizen. What is the mundane? What is private or political? How do people choose their paths, and how free are these choices? How responsible are individuals for upholding and reproducing the machinations of power? How close can you get to violence before it becomes part of who you are?
Butler Hallett proposes no answers to these questions but only keeps them simmering beneath a gripping and engaging story. In this way, Constant Nobody avoids being merely a treatise encased in a narrative. Story comes first; reflection is up to the reader.
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