Siberian education

"To live outside the law you must be honest," Bob Dylan sang once, and few books I've read stick as closely to that as Siberian Education, the story of Nicolai Lilin's youth in the contested republic of Transnistria (Moldova/Russia). According to Lilin, this is where Stalin sent more or less the entire Siberian mob back in the day, and they've all settled there and carried on their business. We get to follow the young Nicolai from childhood - starting with the first time he sees the police come into their home to arrest his grandfather, only to get sent packing outgunned, humiliated and ridiculed - until he turns 18, by which time he's been to juvenile prison twice, seen a lot of violence (really, a LOT) and taken active part in much of it himself.

The word "honesty" is indeed used a lot here, and almost exclusively by and about people who live outside the law. This is a society which has evolved under pressure from the outside, and survived through both political purges, the rise and fall of empires, a state that actively wants to get rid of them, and obviously the fact that they all get sent to jail or get killed regularly. In return, they've become a tight-knit community with very strict rules, where family and faith are sacred, where the young and strong look out for the weak and old, where everyone works together for the common good, and all that jazz. This isn't just organized crime, it's a society organized around crime. Very well organized. And I say that not to hold it up as an ideal or anything, but because of this odd effect: as Lilin gets deeper into how this society works, all the unspoken rules, all the moral imperatives, all the hidden-to-outsiders meanings, all the things that we take for granted about how the world works without necessarily questioning them suddenly become the text. It becomes more than just a book about how a group of people live (and kill, and die), but also why, how a lot of things that people both here and there take for granted are actually that way for a reason - not quite a philosophical treatise on the construction of society, ethics and moral relativism, but, y'know. Quite fascinating at times.

That's the good. The bad? Well for starters, as always with these sorts of books, you have to decide how to approach it. After all, this is an author who has no issues with telling us in detail how he's hurt others and seen people get hurt. Sure, almost every act of violence described in the book is committed either against police (who are pretty much seen as non-human) or against other criminals (often children, but criminals all the same), but ultimately I assume all these criminals have to rob someone, and while Lilin's silence about that works well as part of setting up how their world works (do you think of Chinese child labour every time you put on a pair of sneakers?), it doesn't make the book any less disturbing. You can take issue with this, or you can read it as a pure objective reportage: "Here's what happens, the naked truth, from the point of view of someone who was there. Questions?" (And then get out your Black Books DVDs and watch the episode where they try to hold a reading for an autobiography by a former gangster.) But there's still a certain feel of wanting to have the cake and beat it too - to entertain and shock with details about the criminal life, while still mostly letting us keep our safe distance from it. And to be honest (sorry), the descriptions of slashed tendons, busted heads and prison rapes soon lose their shock value and become just really repetitive.

Part of that is because of the text itself. Somewhere in Italy, an editor hasn't done his job. Not only is Lilin's prose amateurish to say the least, but the pacing is way off. Lilin tells his story in a series of episodes, each of which keeps getting interrupted so he can explain the meaning of every minute detail, give backstories of every character, and relate anecdotes from years earlier. A good writer might have pulled it off - especially the last 100 pages, before the book ends rather abruptly, read like an attempt to imitate the last 20-30 minutes of Goodfellas - but here, it just feels like he's constantly losing track.

At the end, we're left with a book that fulfills its blurb of being "a snapshot of a violent world," as such it has its merits and if you're into that sort of thing by all means give it a go; but it could have used autofocus, a wide-angle lens, and some retouching.