Music at the Garden House
Formats: PDF, Palm, Rocket eBook, Acrobat Reader
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REVIEW BY GREGORY HARRIS
A new thriller set in the turbulent period after the fall of Berlin stands as a solid second offering in an exciting trio of novels exploring Russia during the twilight of the Soviet Union. Music at the Garden House, the second installment of Patricia le Roy's Lenin's Ghost trilogy, follows two young people, suddenly reunited after 10 years apart, in a tense chase across Europe with the fate of nations at stake. The trilogy's first e-book volume, The Angels of Russia, caused a stir when it was nominated for England's prestigious Booker Prize. In this second volume, Axel, a Soviet functionary whose conscience has compelled him to leak at set of secret Soviet documents, takes flight with Katherine, an English journalist's wife he first met a decade ago in Moscow. The author frames her story using a bold device for a thriller. Like a master moviemaker, she introduces her story's major characters in a single, sweeping prologue. Axel attends his father's deathbed, nearly a decade after the events in the book. During Axel's vigil, his father, a former general in the Red Army, asks what his son is most proud of. The resulting narration comprises the novel, yet le Roy quickly induces the reader to forget that Axel and Katherine must, after all, have survived the perilous intrigue they endured. Of course, the experiences of their journey, and the characters' resulting growth, is the real story of Music at the Garden House. But le Roy doesn't stop there in her use of virtuoso techniques. She succeeds in the difficult business of having two main characters narrate the book in turns, from alternate points of view. In different voices, she reveals the characters' history and Axel's true motives in smuggling the explosive documents. The use of different voices also allows le Roy to portray some of the more exciting events of the book from a more introspective, even detached perspective. For example, when Axel attacks an agent who tracks them to their refuge and stealthily breaks in late at night, Katherine describes the scene. The reader experiences not the struggle over a knife and a gun, but the wait in the dark, hearing first the grunts of exertion and the crash of overturned furniture, and then the silence indicating that one man has won. The reader must wait to learn if the victor is Katherine's friend or the sinister agent. Providing both a thrilling adventure and a somber portrait of the decay of the Soviet system, Music at the Garden House is an exciting reminder that the Cold War didn't end with a whimper. Gregory Harris is a writer, editor and former student of the Russian language living in Indianapolis.
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