When the doves disappeared

When The Doves Disappeared continues the themes from (the rather magnificent) Purge; wartime and post-war Estonia, a small country caught between Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. And like Purge, it does so in two parallel timelines, with the story set first in the early 40s as nationalist Estonians welcome the German forces who "liberate" the newly incorporated Estonian SSR, and picking up again in the early 60s as an entire generation has grown up under Soviet rule.

And yet the focus character remains the same: Edgar Parts (or Eggart Fürst, as he prefers to go by for a few years), master of that most hallowed of human traits, the ability to adapt to his environment. From failed nationalist soldier to Nazi collaborator to KGB propagandist, he's perfected the art of fitting in, of telling his superiors what they want to hear and changing his face to fit the current political situation - in other words, he lies, he spins stories, and now he sits there in his grey Soviet apartment writing the definitive history of Nazi collaborators during the Hitler years. He should know, after all, he was one of the leading... uh, anti-Nazi collaborators. Yup, that's the ticket. (In the foreword, Oksanen says she was inspired by the story of a man who made everyone around him believe he was famous pioneer pilot without ever having set foot in a plane, and wondered what that life must have been like for his wife.)

So then there's his wife who hated her sexless marriage and fell in love with a German soldier, and his cousin who still believes in neither Nazi nor Soviet supremacy, and all the other people he's run into, and whose stories he gets to tell on their behalf, except when they get to take over for a chapter or two and tell their own side of the story... which doesn't matter, since in the end they're not the ones writing an Official Soviet History, and their superior officers never praised them for their initiative, so there.

When The Doves Disappeared is a very confident novel, with vivid characters; the parallel timelines and conflicting narrative voices complement each other beautifully, and the themes of self-deception and survival mechanisms mean that Oksanen has to be subtle in putting across what the characters don't allow themselves to think or feel; like the Estonian flag they quickly run up the pole in the short days between the Nazis evacuating and the Red Army coming back, things show through the cracks. Occupation (in whatever meaning you want to take the word) permeates everything, and not everyone manages to cope - in fact, the novel seems to say, the only way of fully coping is to give up and play along. It's an indictment of tyranny - political, sexual, social - told through someone whose entire life is spent justifying it even as it affects himself.

The only thing that bugs me is that as much as I like unreliable narrators, Parts just doesn't grab me as a main character. His actions are fascinating, and the more we learn about him the more we understand who he is and why he is like that, but he himself remains... kind of an annoying coward, whose identity has been so thoroughly scrubbed that he barely exists. Which may be the point; we want our villains to be audacious, like he describes them in his book, we want a Hitler and a Stalin and a Bin Laden, not an army of faceless yes men who quietly adapt to anything and help put pressure on the ones who won't.

It's a very good novel, one I sped through in a couple of days, unable to get out of my head; just not quite as brilliant and as immediate as Purge was. But then, that's a very high standard to hold someone to.