I seem to have made a real habit of reading a Natasha Pulley novel during a big summer vacation. So it’s not a huge surprise that our trip to Yosemite National Park this year matched up almost perfectly with the release of Pulley’s latest novel, The Half Life of Valery K. And this book was the perfect vacation read; I kept putting it down to make it last longer and then almost immediately picking it back up because I needed to find out what happened.
Our main character, Valery Kolkhanov, wakes up covered in frost in a Siberian gulag. He’s partway through a ten-year sentence for being an enemy of the state, and he can already feel his half-starved brain shutting down as he lets himself dream of the occasional luxury (warm boots, a can of condensed milk) and settles in for the next miserable four years.
He’s released from the gulag that day, and sent to a lab in an irradiated forest to help a former mentor study the effects of long-term radiation. It happens that fast, and it takes Valery – who was convinced at first that he was being sent to be a test subject rather than a scientist – a few days to realize that something is very wrong and that the government is covering up even more than they usually do.
People were glued together with logic a lot more than they were glued with the strong nuclear force, and not one atom of any of this made sense.
Natasha Pulley’s other books are more fantastical, set in a fever-dream South America, or alternate-history 1800’s Great Britain, or clockwork-filled 19th century London. This novel is a lot colder. Inspired by actual events and the real-life dangers of living in a Cold War-era Russia, this is a country where children were taught to turn in their own parents for disloyalty to the Party. Criminals convicted of theft, rape, and murder were actually treated better than an academic who’d been singled out as being influenced by the West. As Pulley reminds us in the afterward, 20 million people, almost a fifth of the entire population, served time in the gulag. And most of the remaining population pretended it wasn’t happening. This is not a steampunk tale with cute pet octopi.
…Okay there is one pet octopus. It’s Natasha Pulley; from what I can tell from her previous books there’s a sixty percent chance of an octopus, and a one hundred percent chance of a passionate, soulmate connection between two male characters, at least one of whom is really dangerous.
Relationships in Pulley’s novels are generally pretty fraught. Many of the heterosexual ones are a marriage of convenience; due to the time period, anything not hetero is very illegal. But it’s even more fraught here, because Valery Kolkhanov is inexplicably drawn to KGB agent Shenkov, who’s job is to make sure none of the researchers misbehave. “Misbehavior” in this case would be leaking the information that the radiation levels in the surrounding area are a lot higher than anyone is letting on, and Shenkov’s “job” is stop that by any means necessary, up to and including shooting them.
Shenkov is very good at his job. Everyone at the lab is terrified of him, including Valery. And Valery doesn’t get less terrified as he gets to know him, it’s just that after a while the terror of being shot is equaled by his fear that Shenkov will realize how much Valery looks forward to seeing him. Not to mention his despair that he will never realize that, even when Shenkov has for no particular reason gotten weirdly protective of him.
“Promise me you won’t do anything stupid. No calling the Kremlin, no calling journalists. If I get an order through to shoot you, I will be…” his hands flickered and he dropped the photograph, which landed with a tap on the desk “annoyed.”
All of Pulley’s other books have featured some type of magic. Here, the “magic” is radiation in all it’s forms: alpha, gamma, atom bombs, how many roentgen’s per hour can cause radiation poisoning, and a disaster that according to the Kremlin absolutely didn’t happen in 1957. Pulley unspools the information throughout the story, the experiments the lab is supposed to be running, the reasons why it’s obviously not what’s happening (or not only what’s happening), even little tidbits about other radiation experiments throughout history. (I actually remember learning in high school about the one particular hot-shot scientist, and being amazed that anyone could be so BONE STUPID with something that can level an entire building.)
So what could make studying this incredibly volatile substance even more dangerous? Well, you could be in the power of a government who values two things above everything else: keeping quiet, and following orders. Even if the orders are out of touch with reality. Even if no one in the bureaucracy is interested in hearing about the dangers. Telling someone in command about a potential disaster, or even that their solution to the disaster isn’t going to work, well, that could get you killed. And then they’d go ahead with the unworkable solution anyway.
“It would be worth getting shot.”
“No, it wouldn’t, because then you’d be dead and they would still be sending sand.”
And then of course there’s the scientists who know what’s going on, and are doing horrible, horrible things in the name of Science. And they’re not going to be talked down, because they’re convinced the data from the experiments could save thousands of lives. And they may even be right, but that doesn’t change the fact that an innocent person is dying a horrible death while the scientist killing them is feeling a few more pieces of their soul wither away.
“These tests have to be done. On someone. It will be horrendous, whatever happens. But in the end you’ll either have done the science or you won’t. If you don’t, someone else will, because it’s necessary.”
And in the middle of all of this is Valery. Eternally delighted by science, generally frightened but almost ridiculously forthright, even when telling the truth is a really, really bad idea (there were several times when I found myself saying “Jesus, Valery, could you not?”) The book is told slightly out of chronological order, circling around and around an incident in Valery’s past that more than anything else – more than Nazi experiments, more than torture and interrogation and imprisonment for studying at the wrong university in the wrong country – shaped him into the frail and lonely man who’s convinced he has nothing but numbers for a soul.
Whenever he thought he was learning to be warmer, and more human, something like this reminded him again that he was only a reptile in disguise.
Radiation, and a repressive government that has zero value for human life, are both equally poisonous. We see here the very tragic effects of both, over and over. This book is quite, quite dark, but all that darkness makes the lighter bits shine a little more. Pulley writes with a lot of dry humor, subtle teasing, people taking advantage of the fact that their dinner host can’t speak Russian. (“Did he run over your cat and then punch you romantically in the face?” “Shut up, or I’m going to inhale this wine.”) The characters can be ruthless, but also endlessly clever. There are a few moments where I spotted when something had been set up to pay off later, but I didn’t care because I was cheering when it happened.
Valery himself is almost too kindhearted for his own good, the kind of character who will strategically cringe for authority but also refuse to allow dangerous gang members in prison to believe they’re too stupid to learn to read. And his absolutely improbable relationship with Shenkov is warm, and quiet, with Valery ninety-nine percent certain he’s imagining it, he doesn’t deserve it, it can’t possibly exist. Right up until the moment it does.