Living Souls is set in a projected mid-twenty-first-century Russia, a country that has seen the value of its vast oil reserves plummet due to the discovery of Phlogiston, a substance that mysteriously (and cleanly) powers the rest of the world, but is unobtainable on Russian soil. Indeed, oil is so abundant and so worthless that the people are forced to fashion revolting synthetic food out of it.

This economic apocalypse underpins a ludicrous civil war between rival factions that both claim descent from ethnic groups who historically began to influence Russia before the turn of the first millennium AD. The Varangians, Swastika-wielding, Odin-worshipping militarists, in thrall to a soldiers’ rulebook and a cult with seven distinct levels of initiation, trace their lineage from Viking traders, raiders and settlers; the Khazars, Southern Russians bolstered by Jews and liberals exiled from Moscow, hark back to the Khazar Kaganate, a Caucasian kingdom that flourished between the 7th and 10th centuries AD, and converted to Judaism around the turn of the 9th. The novel opens a year into the war, when bloody fighting has given way to a stalemate of marching and feinting, with all operations focused on the legendary Deguino, a village which, despite being overrun by units from each faction in turn, remains miraculously stocked with all the food an army could wish for.

Forgotten in the struggle between the Khazars and the Varangians is a third people, the natives, listless wanderers obscurely obsessed with circles, who, if they were only left alone, have the power to bring fertility to the fields just by speaking to them. The prime mover behind  the plot, which follows the struggles of four couples caught up in the conflict, is a native prophecy that if a Varangian man has a child with a native woman or a Khazar woman with a native man, total destruction will be visited upon Russia. A shadowy and omnipotent operator flits behind the scenes, pulling strings to prevent the prophecy from being fulfilled, and, as the final battle for Deguino nears, the brief lights and slight beginnings of a new era emerge.

Living Souls is a defiantly bewildering novel that may well leave many British readers scratching their heads. The pivotal village of Deguino could have been lifted straight from an Asterix comic, there’s a faint note of hysteria in each character’s every utterance, and as the story progresses it gets stranger and stranger, with any hope of clear and cogent resolution fading well before the last page. Yet all this seems appropriate to a satire that uses Russia’s potential future as a prism through which to view a past  that has seen serfdom give way to communism and then oligarchy without resolving the vast inequalities and wealth and power that have bestowed such miseries on its people. Moreover, it is this elemental, joyous weirdness that makes Bykov’s novel so memorable. The government scheme that sees homeless ‘Joes’ adopted into family homes like  Battersea dogs, learning simple tricks to impress their would-be fosters, is an particularly satisfying detail. Living Souls carries a curious and difficult to define emotional charge. There are strong overtones of yearning, loss, despair and hope as its characters struggle blindly though a vast country with a bottomless past. It is daft, melodramatic, absurdly inventive, a sprawling epic. For better or worse, an unforgettable read.

Reviewed by Paul Engles

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