Book reviews

The small backwater Russian town of Zavolzhsk is enlivened by the panicked arrival of a terrified monk from a sacred monastery upon a nearby island, with his words, “Coming after me! Huge and black!… Basilisk is coming… It is the end!” alarming the people and adding to the recent rumours about something amiss on the “small forested rock” that was home to the St Basilisk’s hermitage.

But why would a monk, dead for 800 years, suddenly rise up and begin speaking of ominous curses? Are the monks of New Ararat Monastery imagining things? To sort out this unacceptable turmoil, His Excellency the Bishop Mitrofanii decides to send an atheistic young ward of his to the scene, much to the displeasure of the Bishop’s “spiritual daughter”, Sister Pelagia, who feels that he is a bad choice. But word reaches them that the arrogant young Alexei Stepanovich has fallen into a terrible calamity while pursuing the investigation. The Bishop sends a high-ranked policeman to follow up the bizarre situation, but something dreadful happens… and events continue their tortuous path when yet another emissary meets with a terrifying misfortune.

It seems that Sister Pelagia must sort out the strange cursed happenings, but of course she cannot go to New Ararat as a nun, for no nuns are permitted. Disguised as an elegant noblewoman from Moskow (and then as an audacious young monk), the freckle-faced, charming, impetuous nun finds herself experiencing more danger than she had expected in the community; there’s a fiendishly jealous young woman, a man slavishly enthralled to the point of murder, a manor full of lunatics with “interesting” symptoms, the two emissaries who have been driven mad after something happened at a strange cottage, and the strange death of a man no one would ever have thought likely to commit suicide…

And of course there’s the Black Monk himself… and Sister Pelagia is not long in determining that this is a most fiendish and cruel trickster with some strange purpose in mind.

The writing of Boris Akunin (who also writes the Fandorin mystery series) is simply superb. His style is very accessible, combining drama, humour, gothic shadows and an air of innocent artlessness, and it’s no wonder he’s been compared to such diverse writers as Tolstoy, Gogol and Arthur Conan Doyle. His characters are vivid and exciting; his plots are deliciously rich with detail and a wonderful sense of many strands being woven together. The translation from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield could not be bettered.

This is the second in the Sister Pelagia series, and its air of curses, mysteries, old secrets and cunningly original investigations give it a powerfully universal appeal.

Who would have thought that the heart of the mystery lay in the story of St Basilisk finding that small rocky island so long ago…?