"What is Love but..." - review of "Novgorod The Great", by Andrew Drummond (Polygon)

[sheenaghpugh]

Innkeeper Voronov regrets losing touch with his sons:

        "What have they done," he concluded nervously, "but run off with the maids?  What young man would not do the same, if he was kept in the same house with them […]?"
       Mrs Voronova saw the justice of this observation and dried her eyes. "It is only natural," she admitted.
       Her husband continued on this romantic vein of thought: "Until that night when, all being quiet, he slips on his boots and coat and-"
       "A young man will always follow his-" judged the wife.
       "-breeches," finished her husband, continuing to paint a simple picture of elopement, "and set off into the world with nothing but a knife in his-"
       "-heart," she concluded.
       "-pocket and a girl on his arm," Voronov sighed.

This conversation, its two tracks occasionally crossing, more often running alongside each other, is typical of a novel in which communication is constantly hampered by the fact that people are better at talking than listening. Even Horatio, infatuated with Ksenia, finds it hard, when she is telling him her story, to stop his mind wandering to inconsequential mental arithmetic. Most people in this novel have a story to tell, and since each is more interested in his or her own story than in any other, there are several of these two-track dialogues. Indeed there are two tracks to the novel itself; one concerning Horatio, who may be a merchant, and Ksenia, who may be a widow, who spend a night together in 1833 at the bedside of a dying man in Novgorod, and the other concerning the adventures of the Cochrane family, one of whom, the traveller John Dundas Cochrane, had been married to Ksenia, while his father Andrew had been a friend of the dying man, Major Sinclair.  The novel's two strands, therefore, cross and interact from time to time; indeed Andrew's ghost occasionally turns up at Sinclair's bedside, along with a bookseller who appears to be a werewolf and a soldier who is an imerach (a human mirror, forced to reflect everything others say or do). The structure of the novel itself is reminiscent of the imerach:  John Cochrane's fascination with arcane facts and measurements reflects Horatio's, while the way in which Ksenia mirrors the Major's dead love Amélie causes another conversation to go off at cross-purposes.

It will be seen, then, that as in Drummond's two earlier books An Abridged History (reviewed here) and A Hand-Book of Volapük (reviewed here), this one contains rich potential for comedy, and this does exist, not least in chapter headings such as "He took the only course open to an honourable man  and fled to Europe" and "Degeneracy, rhubarb and millions of squirrels". But this strikes me as his most serious novel so far: its leitmotiv is a rhetorical question that keeps being asked, and variously answered, "What is Love but…."  There are as many answers as there are questioners, and I don't think any one is meant to be definitive: the implication is more that the question needs to be constantly asked and considered. 

Most of the main characters are historical personages, but while there is much in print by and about the Cochranes, far less has been written about Ksenia and Horatio. Strangely enough, it does seem to me that they and their strand of the novel come more alive than the Cochranes do, perhaps because their creator felt he had a freer hand with them.

Drummond has been quoted as saying that he writes novels because nobody else writes the kind of novel he wants to read. I can believe that, because he doesn't really write or sound quite like anyone else. I found his first novel in a cut-price Aberdeen bookshop and have been hunting down others ever since.  I'm off now to read the one novel by him that I haven't caught up with yet.