The Mean Streets

*Victory Square

by Olen Steinhauer

St. Martin’s Minotaur     $24.95

ISBN 0-312-36971-9   

(*Mystery News, October-November 2007)                    

Victory Square is the fifth novel and the concluding chapter in Olen Steinhauer’s marvelous series tracing the tumultuous history of an unnamed Eastern Bloc country from the 1940’s to the “soft” or “velvet” revolution which, in theory anyhow, brings democracy to that land in 1989. Each novel in the quintet focuses on one principal character who, in turn, then becomes a minor player in the next installment. In that way the structure of the entire opus parallels or mirrors the shifting perspectives and often non-linear narrative technique employed in each separate installment. Pretty nifty, no? Well, if you haven’t glommed onto this series yet you need to. Stenhauer is one talented comrade.

This time around the spotlight (or maybe I should say searchlight?) falls on Emil Brod, the policeman who was the protagonist in The Bridge of Sighs (2003). Days from retirement as chief of the People’s Militia, the old case that began Brod’s career forty-one years ago comes back to haunt him and to threaten the people (the very few people, I might add) that he loves. Half a century ago as a young and idealistic state functionary, Brod saw to the capture of a (socialist) revolutionary who was suspected of murder and kidnapping. His dogged (“all I’ve ever had is persistence”) pursuit of a man who was at the time a national hero led to that individual’s arrest, trial and ultimate exile to a labor camp. But every action has consequences and as Emil Brod soon discovers those consequences can be a very long time coming.

Victory Square is a stunning, utterly absorbing novel set against the chaotic and often murky backdrop of revolutionary politics. Like the other books in this series, it’s also a very difficult book to characterize. Steinhauer employs elements from any number of genres – the police procedural, the espionage novel, the political thriller – but he combines them in a manner that, in the end, transcends them all. Readers will no doubt be reminded of John LeCarré, Eric Ambler, Arthur Koestler and Graham Greene. Steinhauer is that good. At the same time he has nevertheless managed to craft a voice and a vision that is manifestly his own.

In the same way, the author builds his story on the superstructure of the events leading up to the Romanian Revolution of 1989. Yet those real historical events and details are used only as background, as the broad shapes and blurry shadows from which Steinhauer creates a tour de force of mythopoesis: “My piece of fictional real estate has always been the product of a Western imagination casting about for an image of the communist East”, the author writes in his Afterword, “influenced by all the countries I’ve come in contact with and guided more by my personal obsessions than by any historical exactitude.”

True to form, many of the characters from the previous novels in this series also play a role in this one as well. Gavra Noukias, Ferenic Kolyeszar, Jerzy Michalec and even Brano Sev, for example, figure in a story which is Byzantine in the extreme. Yet Steinhauer never serves up more than the attentive reader can handle. When all is said and done, however, it is primarily through the aging, brooding eyes of Emil Brod that we learn the degree to which our worst fears and darkest intimations about thenature of reality are in fact far more than merely paranoid delusions. “Good” and “Evil” do indeed exist, for example, but their reality is shifting, contingent and always problematic. All of our actions no matter how “private” or “personal,” ultimately have “political” implications. And the converse is also true; broader social forces impinge upon even the most intimate dimensions of our lives. “When your personal life runs so sharply into the life of your country, Brod concludes, “there’s no place to rest … stories like mine are not supposed to happen.” As Brod – and by extension, the reader – also discovers, truth itself is amorphous, plastic. What’s “true”, in other words, is what happens to be deemed most useful, most expedient, and most convenient by those in power at any given time.

Victory Square is a rich and rewarding novel as well as a spellbinding finale to one of the most remarkable and original series of novels written in the last decade. Truth may indeed be stranger than fiction but what makes Steinhauer’s vision so convincing, so disturbing, is the conclusion that, in the world of postmodern politics, the line between fiction and reality has been all but erased or, rather, reality is itself a species of fiction.

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