The first thing to do here is to acknowledge and thank Kristiina Randmaa for this book, which she brought as a gift to the works party we had at the end of last year. This is the second book I received from a colleague this way (the other being the Kappillan of Malta, from Marie-Claire, reviewed in the very first of these reviews) which has enlightened me considerably about a country which which I was almost wholly unfamiliar. Incidentally, Kristiina and Marie-Claire shared an office for years, so, who knows, perhaps the idea was in the air somewhere.
Actually, a brief digression. Bringing a book as a gift to a party is such a self-evidently great idea that I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often. A paperback is about the same sort of outlay as an average supermarket bottle of wine, and, though I am never displeased with a bottle of wine, the potential added value of a book is so much greater. I suppose the catch is there, in the word "potential" - how to gauge the "right" book, which the recipient will actually want to read... Anyway, both Kristiina and Marie-Claire came up trumps, even if it took me a while in both cases to get round to reading the books - burgeoning book waiting list oblige.
Purge is the story of an Estonian family, or in fact the women of an Estonian family, living through the upheavals of their country over the latter half of the twentieth century. The historical events of those years: a pre-war period as the independent Republic of Estonia, Soviet annexation, German "liberation' and occupation, re-integration into the Soviet Union as the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic and then the re-emergence of a shaky independent Estonia in 1991 are all viewed through the prism of the effects on the main characters. The central event is the Stalin's postwar purge of those considered politically unreliable, in Estonian terms those too much associated with either the idea of an independent Estonia or identified as having cosied up too much to the German occupiers.
The central figures are two sisters, Ingel and Aliide, the former the more attractive, warm-hearted and successful sister, resented for it by younger sister Aliide, who in particular cannot get over Ingel's marriage to the glamourous nationalist Hans Pekk, whom "she saw first" (albeit only by a matter of moments)... The core story of the book is about Aliide's struggle to survive in a drastically swinging political environment while at the same time in effect trying to wrest Hans back from her sister, convinced that he will finally come round to her view that they belong together. The process involves grievous suffering and grievous betrayals, which go beyond the personal realm into the public/political one as Hans' past and current anti-soviet activities make him, and those around him, a focus of interest for the local NKVD. One of Oksanen's great feats in this book is to evoke the "political" fear of those years (fear justified by episodes of appalling state violence, physical, psychological and, crucially, sexual), and showing how it spills into people's personal and private spheres, distorting motivations and normal emotions.
Because of this empathy, we never condemn Aliide wholly for what she does, conniving in her sister's (and her niece's) deportation - ultimately to Vladivostok, as it turns out - taking their house, spending years hiding the supposedly dead Hans in her remote farmhouse, pursuing her futile dream of making him hers, all this while defensively marrying a devoted local communist (ironically, we later discover, viewed as at best borderline reliable by the KGB), and, as KGB files later reveal, operating as an agent for the regime, probably betraying many of Hans' comrades, though of course never Hans himself. That said, Aliide ultimately kills Hans, when she finally realises he will never let his exclusive devotion to Ingel go, a murder which is in fact only the first of three she will commit in the book.
Surely all this makes Aliide an out and out baddie? Well, no, she is a survivor, and it is this which makes this novel not only about her but about Estonia. Mere survival, overcoming brutalisation at the hands of the men in leather coats and "chrome tanned boots", who try to torture and rape the whereabouts of Hans Pekk out of her (and, terrifyingly, out of her niece, Linda, who is rendered nearly mute by the experience), is a major achievement and one which relativises acts which would, in a normal society, lead to utter moral condemnation.
This relativisation is reinforced by the contemporary thread of the story, which consists of the arrival in Aliide's garden in 1991 of a desperate, disheveled young women on the run from her mafia pimps. Zara, who has been plucked from the hope-free streets of Vladivostok (yep, make the connection...), tempted by dollars and western stockings to work in the sex trade in Berlin, brings the story round full circle. She too has been the victim of appalling sexual and physical violence, not for political reasons but for profit, but still by the same men in leather coats and chrome tanned boots, here ex-KGB men Pasha and Lavrenti. Aliide, her survival instinct fighting it out with her empathy with this strange Russian girl who speaks an archaic version of Estonian, ultimately acts as Zara's saviour. Of course, Zara is Ingel's granddaughter (the silent Linda's daughter) and her desperate act of seeking refuge with Aliide both confronts the older woman with her past and gives her an opportunity to atone for it somehow. Oksanen is too sophisticated a writer to imagine this as any kind of happy ending, indeed she concludes the novel with new post-independence archive material which demonstrates that Aliide's collaboration with the KGB went further than we had fully perceived, but she does offer us a glimmer of hope that the cycle of violence and brutalisation at the hands of the men in leather coats and chrome tanned boots can be broken.
Technically, the novel is highly accomplished, structured around non-consecutive glimpses of different periods, intermingling them to great effect. Also the evocation of backwater Estonian life, the mixing of domestic and rural chores, communist rhetoric, petty corruption, the sounds and tastes of the countryside is highly effective, grounding the larger narratives in a real, intimate world.
Not perfect perhaps, the credibility of the central plot concept is maybe shaky, but this novel is a major achievement and highly enriching for its insights into the experience of people and countries about which I, for one, know disturbingly little. So that's a recommendation.
Betrayal and atonement, perhaps. Purge.
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