Gillian Slovo: Ice Road

How many rhetorical questions in a row is too many? Three, perhaps? Four? Half a dozen? After a while, do you become numb to the endless battering of question marks? Or does the ceaseless repetition, paragraph after paragraph, page after page, chapter after chapter, make each individual instance even more trying?

Enough already. Six measly sentences into my attempt to write a review in the style of Gillian Slovo, and I am whimpering with embarrassment. Some writers bring little to the table in terms of musicality or power of language, but tell a good enough story to hold your attention. Slovo isn't one of them. She has a good story to tell — a great story actually, bursting at the seams with love and loss and the destiny of nations. If her writing were merely dull, this would be a fine book.

But Slovo sails blithely past "dull", leaves "annoying" bobbing in her wake, and drops anchor only when she reaches "appalling". She writes as though she had Satan's own style guide open to the page marked "faux-romantic posturing".

The story takes place in Soviet Leningrad, in the decade leading up to the 1941 German seige. The city has acquired a new leader: Sergei Kirov, one of Stalin's favourites. Astute members of the local party hierarchy have realised what this will mean.

When Stalin turns on Kirov — as he will, inevitably — he will also turn on Leningrad. There are purges coming.

In the calm before this storm, we meet a range of citizens, most of whom have no idea the writing is on the wall. Lovers will be parted; children will lose parents; idealists will die. Slovo pulls off the essential trick of the historical epic: she makes characters likeable enough that the time they live in has immediacy for us.

But the rhetorical questions. The endless repetition. The use of the word "this" as an intensifier, so that a phrase like "this man" or "this city" will be promoted to sentence status and left dangling, apparently in the hope that we'll infer something profound from it. I can forgive a lot in exchange for a moving story, but it took willpower to finish this book.

* Little, Brown, $28


* David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer.