Compartment No 6

by Rosa Liksom
(Serpent’s Tail, £8.99)

SET in the latter years of the Soviet Union, Compartment No. 6 by Finnish writer Rosa Liksom is a work of sometimes lighthearted darkness, a study in the contradictions in the Russian psyche and landscapes.

An unnamed woman, mute except for reflections on her troubled recent past, is settled pleasantly alone in a Moscow train when she is joined by a man outsized in character, attitude and sheer physical bulk who dominates their now shared tiny cabin.

He is an incredible, seemingly semi-mythic but all too human character. A scatological
storyteller, he illuminates his life and others in the fables and part-fables he recounts to excuse his behaviour and vodka-enamoured state.

Thus Liksom reflects on the discomforting contrasts between the wide expanses of the taiga viewed through the cabin window and its claustrophobic intense interior, dominated by endless helpings of rye bread, smetana and the Pushkin dark chocolate consumed by the woman’s gargantuan companion.

Yet, as befits a book about travel, both are moving away away from something, possibly towards something else — Compartment No 6 is also about experiencing and adapting to new circumstances.

The pair eventually come to an uneasy accommodation, even setting out tea for each other and journeying on numerous slightly crazy sight-seeing visits around exhausted Siberian industrial cities.

But the weather is also in flux. The further east they go, so the evidence of the approaching spring becomes overwhelming. There is a hint of Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Thaw, with the weather as an extended metaphor for change both in the woman and possibly in the Soviet Union itself.

For the country experienced in this book is a tired one, enervated but still with an inner strength and not entirely given over to the corruption of cynicism.

There are some quite extraordinary passages of energy, including an almost Dostoyevskian episode when a deer injured after being hit by the train is inexpertly despatched by an axe wielded by the female compartment guard.

This wonderful, almost elegiac, book embraces the mundane and the heroic in equal measure.

PAUL SIMON