Boris Akunin - Murder on the Leviathan - Essay Example

?Boris Akunin: Murder on the Leviathan The Grigoriy Shalvovich Chkhartishvili, who is better known under his pseudonym Boris Akunin, is one of the best loved authors of the contemporary Russian fiction. His books have been best sellers in Russia and are now being translated into other languages so that he is also achieving significant success in the international book markets. This paper introduces the author with a few biographical details and then examines his novel Murder on the Leviathan. The main features of the novel are outlined, and author’s style is analyzed with a view to establishing why Akunin has become one of the most popular Russian writers of modern times. Akunin was born in 1956 and has lived most of his life in Moscow where he was employed for many years as deputy editor of a Russian literary journal called Inostrannaia literature. He studied Japanese language and culture in order to become a translator of Japanese literature, and it is this culture that inspired his pen-name Aku (which means evil) and nin (which means man) in Japanese language (Sobolev, 2004, p. 64). This background gives Akunin a wide knowledge of both Russian and international literary scenes and means that he is well-placed to identify trends in the public’s taste for modern and classical literature. Besides his translation work, Akunin has written nine novels about his main character Erast Fandorin who is an idiosyncratic retired police detective from the pre-Revolution period in Russian history. Because of ideological constraints under Communism, it was difficult for writers to engage with this period and genre. Detective novels in the West have traditionally been in the distinctly old fashioned British style of Sherlock Holmes, followed by Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey. The middle aged wealthy and usually unmarried male detective indulges his passion for crime in a discreet and upper class environment with all the trappings of Victorian melodrama. This is exactly the genre that inspires Akunin’s Fandorin character. More recently there has been a shift in the literary scene to rather more graphic crime novels, with a focus on police detectives. There is a vast global industry including notably writers from Scandinavia, Italy and further afield, and the bestsellers are turned into successful films and television series. Akunin’s choice to return to the earlier models for inspiration is, therefore, somewhat contrary to the most recent international trends, but very much in line with the general interest that people continue to have in crime and mystery stories. It is a step out of the harsh, industrial and post-industrial present into an era where the aristocracy still roamed the earth and conspicuous consumption was an accepted norm in the upper echelons of society. Critics have noted that Akunin’s books are part of a new wave of recent Russian fiction, which under Soviet rule had been polarized into either high brow literature or trashy novels with nothing in between: “The success of the Akunin books proves the growing cultural presence of the post-Soviet middle class, which has the taste to appreciate the new literature – and the money to pay for it” (Aron, 2002, p. 1). By targeting an audience that is moderately well educated, but not necessarily interested in high-brow or classical literature, Akunin exploits the expanding Russian market for lightweight but entertaining literature which can be described as “middle brow.” Turning now to the novel itself, it becomes clear that Akunin is a master of style. The book opens with a depiction of a French police detective, Gustave Gauche, watching a passenger boarding a ship, and this passenger turns out to be the main hero, Erast Fandorin. This little twist in narrative perspective is amusing since it is normally Fandorin who would be quietly observing potential suspects. This is a humorous distancing maneuver, and it is, incidentally, very similar to Agatha Christie’s opening scene in Murder on the Orient Express in which a young French Lieutenant named Dubosc overhears a conversation involving a Belgian stranger named M. Hercule Poirot (Christie, 2011, pp. 3-4). The as yet unnamed Fandorin is described ironically as “a candidate for papa Gauche” (Akunin, 2005, p. 13). The character of Gauche is portrayed with an emphasis on his French nationality. The fatherly, slightly overbearing persona that he adopts is ironically depicted by linking it with his liking for fine food, for example. This can be seen when he thinks about solving the crime and judges it to be “Simple as potato soup” (Akunin, 2005, p. 16). The reader cannot help but think that it is he, and not the crime, which is “simple as potato soup.” He likes his wine and holds forth on the advantages of age over youth, while the narrator slyly remarks “And he sipped at his wine, very proud of the originality of his thought and his seemingly unimpeachable logic” (Akunin, 2005, p. 39). The reader, of course, understands that Gauche’s his attempts at advice are overblown and entirely inappropriate in the presence of the master detective Fandorin. All of the international characters in the book are made to embody, in some way, certain cliched characteristics of their nationality. Akunin achieves this by depicting each character through the eyes of the other characters. This tactic allows him to include some outrageously insulting and amusing stereotypes, which the reader will immediately recognise as comic exaggerations. A good example of this is found in Gustave Gauche’s thinking once more: “Gauche pictured to himself a country in which every single person was the same as M. Aono: everybody lived in houses with bowed roofs and disembowelled themselves at the drop of a hat” (Akunin, 2005, p. 27). A similarly excessive portrayal occurs when Renate Kleber observes Mrs Truffo, whom she refers to as” horse-faced” (p. 44) or “Mrs Goatface” ( p. 129) performing a play: “The doctor’s wife had executed her lumbering approach to the diplomat with all the elephantine grace of a typical British seduction…” (Akunin, 2005, p. 128). These ridiculously racist remarks help to define the quirks of all the passengers and their relationships to each other, all within the very dated conventions of late nineteenth century snobbishness. The very vivid and comic characterization is therefore one of the reasons why Akunin’s novel is so popular with readers. Structurally also, there are indications that Akunin is a skilled craftsman. The location for the story is a huge luxury cruise ship, whose name Leviathan means sea monster, provides also the title of the novel. The choice of a ship on its maiden voyage is a classic detective novel ploy to set up a confined set of parameters in time and space. It again recalls Agatha Christie’s novel Murder on the Orient Express, where sleuth, victims and suspects are locked in a dramatic journey towards solving the crime before the train reaches its final destination. In Akunin’s novel the ship itself provides a dazzling background to the plot. It is described as “the miracle ship” (p. 15), “this floating city” (p. 19) and it has “the atmosphere of a fine old English country estate” (p. 18). In case any reader should be tempted to take this as unqualified praise, the narrator describes the dining chairs in the Windsor Salon as having “a motley assortment of gothic decorative flourishes” (Akunin, 2005, p. 19). The plot rattles along at a fast speed, piling up victims and suspects and setting up the usual array of plausible explanations for the murders. The traditional denouement is also present, in which Fandorin’s superior detective skills manage to save the day, and the net result is an entertaining romp which pokes fun at all the traditions of early British detective fiction. This constant backward look at the literary past is an important reason why the series of novels about the sleuth Fandorin are “deemed to be the most successful turn of the century Russian literary project, in the light of the current appetite for ‘nostalgia mode’ books and films” (Khagi, 2012, p. 1). Readers are lured into a world of luxury steam ships where rich and generally unpleasant characters show off their faults, and all the while remain blissfully unaware just how dreadful they are. Modern readers enjoy the patent unreality of the scenes, and the exuberance of the irony. From this point of view Murder on the Leviathan is an example of postmodern pastiche and “blatant commodification” (Khagi, 2012, p. 1). It wraps up a selection of traditional elements in a new and comical package. In short, Akunin’s novel is so successful because it gives the post-Soviet Russian people exactly what they want. The setting of the novel reconnects with the old pre-Revolution Russia of the nineteenth century through the noble character of Fandorin. The lush social environment is presented to the reader in great detail, though as we have seen above, there is a certain amount of exaggeration and irony running through the story. It is almost as if the twentieth century had never happened, fantastic and ridiculous though this may seem. Russian readers enjoy this sharp contrast with the drab landscape of the recent Communist past. There are tongue-in-cheek allusions to historical events, such as the claims about the superior engineering of the ship which recall the fate of the Titanic. Elements such as the cleverly paced switches of perspectives and elements of pastiche address the tastes of the twenty first century so that the text can be read on multiple levels at once. In my opinion Akunin’s novel Leviathan is so successful simply because it is clever, funny, and an entertaining mix of old and new designed to celebrate a new exuberance in Russian literary taste. Works Cited Akunin, Boris. Murder on the Leviathan: A Novel. New York: Random House, 2005. Aron, Leon. “A Private Hero for a Privatized Country.” American Enterprise Institute Publications (Summer 2002), pp. 1-10. Web. [Accessed 03 December 2012]. Christie, Agatha. Murder on the Orient Express. New York: HarperCollins, 2011. Khagi, Sofya. “Boris Akunin and Retro Mode in Contemporary Russian Culture.” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 41 (Autumn 2012). < http://www.utoronto.ca/tsq/13/khagi13.shtml > Web. [Accessed 03 December 2012]. Sobolev, Olga. “Boris Akunin and the Rise of the Russian Detective Genre.” ASEES 18 (1-2) (2004), pp. 63-85. < http://miskinhill.com.au/journals/asees/18:1-2/boris-akunin-rise-detective-genre.pdf > Web. [Accessed 03 December 2012]. Read More