If Ireland is the land of saints and scholars, then Russia is the home of spies and sadists. In The First Friend, the spy is Lavrentiy Beria, the sadist Josef Stalin, although both are interchangeable. ‘The First Friend’ of the title is Vasil Murtov, Beria’s oldest buddy, and minor Georgian Communist party functionary. The cast of the novel are Georgian and communists, rather than ethnic Russian.
While this is a fine distinction, it’s important to cast this tome as a journey into the murky, Byzantine world of Soviet power, as wielded by ethnic outsiders. Knox’s narrative allows the reader to link post-Soviet life under the arch oligarch Vladimir Putin, via a detailed description of the alphabet soup of terror. In Stalin and Beria’s day, fear was the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), whereas Putin led its successor, the KGB. Sadly, the dread of both regimes remains palpable. A trawl through international news services shows contemporary Georgians desperate to join the European Union along with the beleaguered citizens of Ukraine.
For me, The First Friend is in the tradition of Anatoly Rybakov’s 1987 novel, The Children of the Arbat. Only a skilled author, at the peak of his creative powers, can tackle the murderous intricacies of Georgian/Russian/Soviet family and clan loyalties, which come to a head in the sad world of Vasil Murtov. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at a cupboard drawer again without wincing. ‘Tyrannies begin with fiction and their reward is more fiction.’
Take a bow Malcolm Knox. The First Friend is not for the faint hearted.
Reviewed by Henry Johnston
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Malcolm Knox was born in 1966. He grew up in Sydney and studied in Sydney and Scotland, where his one-act play, POLEMARCHUS, was performed in St Andrews and Edinburgh. He joined the Sydney Morning Herald in 1994 and his journalism has been published in Australia, Britain, India and the West Indies.
His first novel Summerland was published to great acclaim in the UK, US, Australia and Europe in 2000. In 2001 Malcolm was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald‘s Best Young Australian novelists. He lives in Sydney with his wife Wenona, son Callum and daughter Lilian. His novel, A Private Man, was critically acclaimed and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize and the Tasmanian Premier’s Award.
Malcolm Knox is a former literary editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and has won a Walkley Award for journalism.
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