Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm willing to risk the good will of - apparently - the entire internet, in order to say that I really didn't enjoy "Child 44". Perhaps, largely because I have lived 'over here' for about twenty years. Sure, it's an argument from experience, but isn't that what "Child 44" purports, at least in part, to be? An argument drawn from historical experience? I understand the fascination with the soviet experience, the good and the bad of it. I have been dealing with that fascination almost all my life - as a son of Slav parents who were not ethnically Russian, but who knew "the Soviet thing" in a real, experiential way. It's like a disease. It's something George Orwell talks about in his outstanding essay "the Prevention of Literature" when he stresses "the poisonous effect of the Russian MYTHOS on English intellectual life." We're all suckers for it. I believe that "Child 44" fails to approach that MYTHOS with any kind of serious consideration or respect. Books like Tom Rob Smith's (and David Benioff's even more laughable "City of Thieves") just tick me off. They unconsciously glamorize something that has no glamour. None. They legitimize it by trivializing it, if you see what I mean. A cartoon is certainly much easier to handle than a 12-part documentary on PBS. But labeling Child 44 cartoonish does a disservice to cartoons. Let's get something straight: I understand how pop fiction is supposed to work. And I'm no prude. I love a good murder mystery, a thriller, an espionage yarn filled with liars and LeCarre's 'seedy little men'. Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter books have a delicious horror and offer moments of outstanding lyricism. Read the first few pages of "Hannibal" (I think it's the third in the series) and tell me if the prose isn't deeply moving. The murders, the gore in Child 44 - ostensibly based on the crimes of soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo - did not turn me off. They are a matter of record and fair game for a fictional treatment as much as anything else. But Smith's writing, its utter lack of subtlety, its ignorance of the nuance of soviet life, its tedious cause and effect line of reasoning, its all or nothing take on everything, its omnipresent melodrama, its historical distortions, and its tin ear for the Russian language, ugh. It all feels like a story a tourist who visited Moscow for a week would tell his family when he got back home to his solid homeland which boasts drivers who follow traffic laws, the presumption of innocence, and hot water on demand. Oh, and a homeland with NO SOVIET PAST peopled with the credulous who already believe in their hearts that Russians are not quite up to snuff. I couldn't disagree more with those who loved "Child 44" - particularly with those who have been deceived into thinking that they "really learned something about Russia" - I hated it. So, for anyone who has an interest in the real horror, the absurdity, the humanity, and the ache of that period, there are so many better options available to you. Fiction, non-fiction, journalism, essay, genre fiction, and poetry: Solzhenitsyn, Grossman, Babel, Bulgakov, Akhmatova, Brodsky, and from perestroika to post-soviet - Pelevin, Tolstaya, Sorokin, and Dovlatov. They'll be harder to find, often harder to read, but they'll talk about real things. Things that Tom Rob Smith is only guessing at. And, to my reading, guessing wrong.