A Son of the Rock

Mariner Books, 1998, 187 p

Here, we are in Moscow in 1913. Though educated in England, printer Frank Reid has spent most of his life in Russia, inheriting the business from his father, but that life is thrown into disarray when his wife Nellie ups and leaves leaving him with three children to cope with, Dolly, Ben and Annushka, and so he engages a young woman, Lisa Ivanovna, as a sort of nanny.

The details of life in pre-revolutionary Russia seem convincing, the sealing up of houses windows’ for the winter, the casual bribery (connected with a mention of the venality of Grigory Rasputin,) the petty regulations, the restrictions placed on the movement and employment of Russian citizens, the necessity to assuage the police and other relevant authorities. Some incidents are at times reminiscent of Doctor Zhivago, particularly the association between Lisa Ivanovna and Volodya Vasilich, the man who breaks into the printing shop one night and fires a gun at Frank, though the dynamic is reversed.

Reid’s interactions with others, his deputy Selwyn Osipych, whose main interest is in having his volume of poems published but who may have been involved with Nellie’s decision to flee, the print shop supervisor, Tvyordov, are both friendly and distanced. His daughter Dolly seems remarkably composed in the face of the situation – but adolescent girls often are.

However, Reid’s burgeoning attraction to Lisa Ivanovna is told to us rather than shown and so does not contain as much force as it might have.

Pedant’s corner:- “Jeyes’ fluid” (Jeyes’s?) “‘I don’t think so. She certainly didn’t say so?’” (isn’t a question,) “there was still barrel organs playing in the streets” (there were still,) benzine (a word used in other languages certainly but the British one is ‘petrol’. Petrol was used later in the phrase “This Russian petrol is very low on benzine.” Make of that what you will.) “Their breaths rose together as steam into the bitterly cold lamplit air” (I know people refer to it this way but steam is actually invisible, the misty you can see emanating from people’s outbreaths is actually water droplets, condensed steam/water vapour.)