Stalker

It must have seemed like a good idea. First, take the post-apocalyptic wasteland scenario that’s been so fruitful it should have science-fiction writers giving thanks to nuclear weapons for the imaginative caffeine they provide. Then tell your story in something resembling the echt-Russian colloquial style known as skaz.

This is what Tatyana Tolstaya does in The Slynx. Centuries after the "Blast," Moscow is ruled by Fyodor Kuzmich, a dictator who has renamed the city after himself. The inhabitants live in medieval poverty, subsisting on mouse-based products and suffering from horrible genetic mutations.

The hero, Benedikt, works as a "scribe," transcribing and disseminating the poetry, proclamations and musings of Fyodor Kuzmich himself. The past survives in the form of "Oldeners" who remember the pre-Blast period, and "Oldenprint books" which are regarded as subversive. Hovering over the scene is the Slynx, a legendary beast that fills the poor residents of Fyodor-Kuzmichsk with fear and suspicion. A story slowly develops, based around Benedikt’s discovery of compromising information about Fyodor Kuzmich, and his marriage to the daughter of the "Head Saniturion"—the chief of the dictator’s political police.

Once you look past the mice, extra fingers and ubiquitous exclamation points, you see a conventional fable about the power and danger of forbidden knowledge, mixed with a pessimistic vision of Russia’s destiny as one of never-ending autocracy.

The Slynx evokes such dystopian classics as Riddley Walker and Fahrenheit 451 but lacks the intense focus on character and motive that distinguishes those books; nor does its imaginative world possess their airtight sense of logic. Tolstaya allows her style to clog the narrative with clouds of rhetoric, reveling in descriptions of post-apocalyptic customs and entertaining genetic defects, but without giving you the feeling (vital to an effective dystopia) that this is how things have to be. A lot of the material looks suspiciously like padding: At one point, there’s a list of books in a library that takes up three whole pages. Much of the dialogue (as well as the slangy, garrulous descriptive passages) sounds like this:

"‘Crikey, Lev Lvovich, nettle is nettle!’ Benedikt said. ‘And grabweed is grabweed. If it grabs you, you’ll know it. You can make soup from nettle. It’s not very good, but you can do it. But just try making soup from grabweed. No way you can make soup of it! No, no, no-o-o,’ Benedikt said with a laugh, ‘you’ll never make soup from grabweed. Yeah, sure, nettle! It’s not nettle. I swear. It’s grabweed. That’s it.’"

I haven’t seen the original, but I suspect that translator Gambrell, who had to render page after page of neologisms and slangy Russian, deserves a medal for her heroic labor. Tolstaya has shown herself to be a fine writer of short stories and nonfiction, but this, her debut novel, bears out the Russian proverb (cited in the text) pervyj blin komom—"the first pancake is a lump."

The Slynx By Tatyana Tolstaya, Translated by Jamey Gambrell Houghton Mifflin, 288 pages, $24.00