Zakhar Prilepin
| Chernaya obezyana | Black Monkey Novel. AST Publishers. Moscow 2011. 207 pages. |
| Foreign rights: | Albania, Armenia, France, Italy, Poland |
The first person narrator, a journalist from a provincial paper, is sent off by his editor-in-chief to research an article about an unsolved violent crime. Rumour has it that the culprits are a gang of children. Via a middleman he gains access to a kind of secret prison that is more of a laboratory. There such extremely violent children are held under observation in cages like rats. The intention is to establish why these children have no fear and no moral barriers. Genetics, upbringing, circumstances, coincidence? When the journalist learns from an informer that the head of the laboratory – allegedly out of religious fervour – deliberately lets the dangerous children loose in the city jungle as avenging angels, his suspicion that it is the secret service who is experimenting with the grooming of a specialist children’s commando begins to falter. Is the report about an African child soldier campaign dished up to him by his middleman intended to mislead him?
Shocking images of fatal attacks by children start to haunt the journalist’s dreams. When his own two children suddenly disappear he experiences bouts of protective instinct coupled with bouts of violence not just against his wife who had moved out and taken the children with her. He also loses control when he seeks consolation in a new love affair and is suddenly confronted with a rival. The rival also seems to be involved with the story of the violent children. In his ongoing research he suddenly seems to be increasingly faced with closed doors and silent witnesses. And then his paper boss is gone and it seems as though he was never commissioned to carry out the research. Is it all a figment of his imagination or has he crossed a boundary with his ever more unconventional research to which someone right at the top has taken umbrage? Does he have a persecution complex or does he now need to fear for his own life?
Prilepin’s continued exploration of the issue of violence is thorough and radical in this new novel. This time with a journalist as the main character, he again focuses on the vertical power impacting on everyone’s lives in Russia. And he again narrates from the perspective of the first person, a first person who, seen from the position of the outside observer, is inexorably drawn in through a quest for knowledge and emotional involvement and this in a double sense: to what extent does he himself have a tendency towards violence? To what extent is he one of them?
