Overview
Present-day Russia is the setting for this stunning new novel from Robert Harris, author of the bestsellers Fatherland and Enigma.
Archangel tells the story of four days in the life of Fluke Kelso, a dissipated, middle-aged former Oxford historian, who is in Moscow to attend a conference on the newly opened Soviet archives.
One night, Kelso is visited in his hotel room by an old NKVD officer, a former bodyguard of the secret police chief Lavrenty Beria. The old man claims to have been at Stalin's dacha on the night Stalin had his fatal stroke, and to have helped Beria steal the dictator's private papers, among them a notebook.
Kelso decides to use his last morning in Moscow to check out the old man's story. But what starts as an idle inquiry in the Lenin Library soon turns into a murderous chase across nighttime Moscow and up to northern Russia—to the vast forests near the White Sea port of Archangel, where the final secret of Josef Stalin has been hidden for almost half a century.
Archangel combines the imaginative sweep and dark suspense of Fatherland with the meticulous historical detail of Enigma. The result is Robert Harris's most compelling novel yet.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Stalin Reborn?
There are books that you agree to review, and then there are those that you beg for -- just to have the opportunity to read it a few weeks before everyone else. I jumped at the chance to get my hands on Robert Harris's latest roller coaster, Archangel. It's been four years since the publication of Enigma -- four years since the world has had the pleasure of reading a novel by this British master. Unbelievably, Enigma topped his debut, Fatherland. Can he do it again with Archangel?
Harris took us on a criminal investigation in postwar Berlin after the Nazis won World War II in Fatherland, and showed us the high-tension world of English code-breakers in Enigma. Harris has a way of bringing us to frightening, mysterious places, and as demonstrated by Archangel, no place is more frightening than Russia after the fall of communism. With vivid language and sharp research, he makes us feel the fear and the hopelessness of a nation without a soul and of the people desperate to regain what once was.
Each of Harris's thrillers is superior, suspenseful, and wild, but the new world order makes Archangel stand out. With current headlines screaming about the instability within the former Soviet Union, no book has been more topical -- or so alarmingly possible.
Fluke Kelso was once a scholar of promise, but like so many in the highly competitive world of academia, he's never delivered. But one night, at a symposium in Moscow concerning the release of secret Soviet archives, he is approached by Papu Rapava, a former Kremlin bodyguard with a story to tell. No one but the desperate Kelso would believe the tale, for what Rapava describes is a sort of Holy Grail among researchers: an actual diary left by Joseph Stalin himself. Such an artifact, if it's genuine -- and if Kelso can survive the fascist Vladimir Mamantov, who wants it for his own agenda -- would be the coup of a lifetime for the discredited researcher.
Before Kelso can learn the location of the diary, Rapava disappears, and Kelso's search for the former bodyguard leads him to the man's daughter, a whore selling herself in the new Moscow of drugs, corruption, and the Russian mafia. With an unscrupulous American journalist hot on their heels, a major of the new KGB close behind, and the shadowy Mamantov following them all, the two follow a trail that leads from Moscow's seedy underbelly to the industrial city of Archangel, where Russia once built her fleets of submarines, to a remote camp on the edge of the Siberian nothingness, and finally to a shocking conclusion that bites like the wind blowing off the tundra. What Kelso sees as the coup of his career might turn out to be the catalyst for an actual coup in Russia. There is a legacy behind the diary, a legacy of evil and death, and Fluke Kelso is unwittingly about to unleash it on the world.
The writing is taut and explosive, and whether Harris is describing the macabre site of a brutal execution or the curdled expressions of the babushkas tirelessly sweeping the refuse of a decaying society, he makes you see, hear, and smell it all. And the plot? The plot is so twisted and clever that you can't put the book down until the end. (That's not a promise, it's a warning. If you start reading on a weeknight, plan to be late for work the following day.)
—Jack B. Du Brul
London Times
Other authors have emulated Le Carré. Harris has swallowed him alive.Evening Standard
Superb. This is a really gripping narrative, full of suspense and unexpected turns, which will keep you hooked until the climax on its final page....I have never read a thriller based in Russia that has such an authentic feel.John Skow
Harris, a master of umbrous what-ifs, is at his best here. -- Time MagazineNY Daily News
Crackling...Harris puts every rival on notice with this tough, savvy and lurid throwback to what-if spydom.Michael Specter
...[Gives] those of us who retain some literary nostalgia for the Evil Empire exactly what we have been waiting for: a thriller about the bad old days set in the deepgray present....In Harris' able hands you can feel the oppression of Stalin's time....If you pull at the threads they'll unravel; so don't. The book is still funexciting even....Harris never loses sight of the big picture. —The New York Times Book ReviewChristopher Lehmann-Haupt
Powerful, clever...delivers the thrills of Graham Greene. Will keep you on edge until its bizarre conclusion.—New York Times
Library Journal
Were Stalin's private papers stolen upon his death? The author of Fatherland keeps rewriting history.Will Lee
[A] sensibly lo-fi thriller....[the hero] staggers toward the momentous truth, leaving us not sweatily out of breath but wearily in the know.-- Entertainment Weekly
Anthony Lejeune
...[A]n exceptionally well written, skillfully crafted, continuously gripping thriller. -- National ReviewJack B. Du Brul
There are books that you agree to review, and then there are those that you beg for -- just to have the opportunity to read it a few weeks before everyone else. I jumped at the chance to get my hands on Robert Harris's latest roller coaster, Archangel. It's been four years since the publication of Enigma -- four years since the world has had the pleasure of reading a novel by this British master. Unbelievably, Enigma topped his debut, Fatherland. Can he do it again with Archangel?Harris took us on a criminal investigation in postwar Berlin after the Nazis won World War II in Fatherland, and showed us the high-tension world of English code-breakers in Enigma. Harris has a way of bringing us to frightening, mysterious places, and as demonstrated by Enigma, no place is more frightening than Russia after the fall of communism. With vivid language and sharp research, he makes us feel the fear and the hopelessness of a nation without a soul and of the people desperate to regain what once was.
Each of Harris's thrillers is superior, suspenseful, and wild, but the new world order makes Archangel stand out. With current headlines screaming about the instability within the former Soviet Union, no book has been more topical -- or so alarmingly possible.
Fluke Kelso was once a scholar of promise, but like so many in the highly competitive world of academia, he's never delivered. But one night, at a symposium in Moscow concerning the release of secret Soviet archives, he is approached by Papu Rapava, a former Kremlin bodyguard with a story to tell. No one but the desperate Kelso would believe the tale, for what Rapava describes is a sort of Holy Grail among researchers: an actual diary left by Joseph Stalin himself. Such an artifact, if it's genuine -- and if Kelso can survive the fascist Vladimir Mamantov, who wants it for his own agenda -- would be the coup of a lifetime for the discredited researcher.
Before Kelso can learn the location of the diary, Rapava disappears, and Kelso's search for the former bodyguard leads him to the man's daughter, a whore selling herself in the new Moscow of drugs, corruption, and the Russian mafia. With an unscrupulous American journalist hot on their heels, a major of the new KGB close behind, and the shadowy Mamantov following them all, the two follow a trail that leads from Moscow's seedy underbelly to the industrial city of Archangel, where Russia once built her fleets of submarines, to a remote camp on the edge of the Siberian nothingness, and finally to a shocking conclusion that bites like the wind blowing off the tundra. What Kelso sees as the coup of his career might turn out to be the catalyst for an actual coup in Russia. There is a legacy behind the diary, a legacy of evil and death, and Fluke Kelso is unwittingly about to unleash it on the world.
The writing is taut and explosive, and whether Harris is describing the macabre site of a brutal execution or the curdled expressions of the babushkas tirelessly sweeping the refuse of a decaying society, he makes you see, hear, and smell it all. And the plot? The plot is so twisted and clever that you can't put the book down until the end. That's not a promise, it's a warning. If you start reading on a weeknight, plan to be late for work the following day.
-- barnesandnoble.com
Newsweek
Sizzling...a zinger.Michael Specter
...[Gives] those of us who retain some literary nostalgia for the Evil Empire exactly what we have been waiting for: a thriller about the bad old days set in the deep, gray present....In Harris' able hands you can feel the oppression of Stalin's time....If you pull at the threads they'll unravel; so don't. The book is still fun, exciting even....Harris never loses sight of the big picture.-- The New York Times Book Review
The NY Daily News
Crackling...Harris puts every rival on notice with this tough, savvy and lurid throwback to what-if spydom.Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
....[S]o outlandish as to defy credibility. But Mr. Harris makes you believe it as it's happending. What he does particularly well is evoke the atmosphere of contemporary Russia...[with] its threat of violent instability, the howling of its caged wolves....an adventure that will keep you on edge until its bizarre conclusion. -- The New York TimesKirkus Reviews
Top-flight thriller, something of a variation on le Carré's The Russia House, as an American historian tracks down a MacGuffin of far greater value than the Maltese falcon. Fluke Kelso, having published two books about the fall of the Soviet empire, finds himself invited to a symposium in Moscow that will supposedly focus on newly released archival material. Some think Kelso will reveal yet another bombshell. And that might be true, since he has secretly interviewed elderly Papu Rapava, bodyguard of KGB chief Lavrenty Beria, about the night that Stalin died. Rapava observed all as Beria took a key from Stalin's neck and stole from a safe an oilskin pouch holding the dictator's memoirs (an improvisation on the theme of Harris' first book, 1986's Selling Hitler, about the faking of the Hitler diaries). Later, the pouch was buried in Beria's backyard. The ever-avid Kelso goes ferreting through some recently declassified papers in the Lenin Library, then hunts up Vladimir Mamantov, a Stalinist fanatic he'd interviewed years ago for his big book about the Soviet collapse, a book sneered at by Mamantov because it painted Stalin black. Mamantov concedes that in Western terms the man was a monster, but avers that by Soviet standards he lifted the U.S.S.R. from the tractor to the atomic bomb. And Mamantov opines to Kelso that Stalinism will return: some 20 million Russians still believe Stalin was the greatest figure of the century—a rather large bloc should some other charismatic figure rise anew to lead it once again.After Kelso makes a secret trip to Beria's house and discovers freshly turned earth, he falls in with an American TV reporter while being trackedby the RT Directorate's chief. Deaths ensue as the trail leads to the White Sea port of Archangel, where Kelso does indeed make a momentous discovery. No personal demons here to soothe, but Harris' knack for recreating historical events puts him in very select company.