'Zugzwang' is one crafty move after the other
A political game plays out with compulsive force in Zugzwang.
By Vikram Johri, Special to the Times
Published November 11, 2007
Zugzwang, Ronan Bennett informs us in the beginning, is a German term that in chess is used to describe a position in which a player "is obliged to move, but every move only makes his position even worse."
Something similar can be said of the state Otto Spethmann finds himself in. A psychoanalyst, Spethmann is asked to treat Rozental, a gifted chess player who is to compete in the international tournament to be held in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1914, one which really did take place.
Bennett has ventured into historical themes in his earlier fiction. The Catastrophist was set in the Belgian Congo and concerned itself with anti-Communist conspiracy. Havoc, in Its Third Year, a grim tale on Catholic insurgency, was set in Yorkshire in the 1630s.
It is Bennett's nature to lend a contemporaneous spin on history. So, in Zugzwang, the fight between Communist terrorists and the Czar's intrigue-ridden police force is painted in strokes not dissimilar to the current discourse on the War Against Terror.
The novel begins with the murder of O.V. Gulko, a respected newspaper editor. But we learn that the body of another man, who goes by the moniker of Yastrebov, has also been discovered. Are the two murders connected, and what relation do they have with Spethmann?
It turns out that the women in Spethmann's life have a lot to account for. There is his daughter, Catherine, a motherless child who harbors an elaborate trove of secrets of her own. And there is the enigmatic Anna, the estranged daughter of a local baron, who wields an inexorable pull.
Bennett uses well-worn tropes of the thriller genre, but his atmospheric evocation of pre-Revolution Russia and the clever melding of chess moves with political subterfuge lend a genuine air to his treatment. Zugzwang was serialized in London's Observer in 2006, and one can see why. The book's bite-sized nuggets, riveting in their own right, merge into a satisfying whole.
Vikram Johri, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, is a writer in New Delhi, India.
Zugzwang
By Ronan Bennett
Bloomsbury, 288 pages, $24.95