Book Review: Zugzwang by Ronan Bennett

Note: Ronan Bennett's upcoming novel "Zugzwang" was published as a serial over seven months in The Observer.

The setting is 1914 St.Petersberg – a city on the cusp of both World War I and Revolution. Multiple groups of secret police and Bolshevik revolutionaries work underground to destroy each other and dethrone the tsar, and the undercurrent of anti-Semitism is strong. Otto Spethmann, a barely Jewish psychoanalyst, unwittingly becomes wrapped up in a plot to assassinate the tsar and unknowingly becomes a player in the nearing revolution.

To understand the complexity of Otto’s situation, and how a person could accidentally find himself in the middle of an assassination plot, all that’s necessary is to take a quick glance at the people in his life.

His wife Elena passed away a few years prior, and he and his 16 year old daughter Catherine live alone with a maid. Catherine teeters between two extremes – that of willful adolescent with a mind all her own and that of needy, loving daughter who misses her mom. They have a close relationship in many ways, but about Catherine’s love life Otto remains in the dark – which is why when detectives come questioning them about the murder of a Bolshevik revolutionary, Otto is shocked to find out that Catherine was sleeping with him – and may know more about the assassination plot than she realizes.

His best friend Kopelzan is a bit of an enigma, and the two have an ongoing chess match that lasts through the entire book and will be the first that Otto has ever won. On the outside, Kopelzan is proud polish Jew, and a hero of the working class, but somehow also manages to justify extraordinarily expensive taste in everything, and an insatiable appetite for women. There is a side of Kopelzan of which Otto has no idea.

A client of Otto’s, Gregory Petrov, is a leading Bolshevik – so much so that he felt it necessary to meet in absolute secrecy – on the rare occasion that he showed for his appointment, and to use a pseudonym in all of Otto’s files. In his sessions, he always seems torn between two places, but will never elaborate.

Another client, referred to Otto by Kopelzan, is famed chess player Rozental, who is a Jew from Poland, and the underdog favorite to win this year’s tournament and the coveted title of Grandmaster. The winner of the tournament also gets a private audience with the tsar. Rozental seems to be some sort of schizophrenic, constantly swatting at a fly on his head, and Kopelzan is inexplicably protective over him.

Meanwhile, Otto begins to fall in love with a woman, Anna, who his daughter hates because of her family – Anna’s father Zinnerov is known as “The Mountain” and is feared as a powerful anti-semite and a close associate of Colonel Gan’s – the infamous leader of the secret police.  

With all of these friends and colleagues, it almost seems inevitable when Detective Lychev comes into Otto’s life, questioning him and Catherine about the revolutionaries, and wondering why famed Bolshevik terrorist Berek Medem has been seen in Otto’s office late at night. Imprisonment and murder are only two of the many situations Otto begins to find himself in as he tries to figure out who is good, who is bad, and why he’s even in this situation to begin with.

There are a lot of characters, and a deep knowledge of history evident in this novel, but somehow Bennett manages to make it all fit together without overwhelming. Even if you were to start the novel with little knowledge of Russian politics, you are quickly submerged into a world that is full of intrigue and deception, much as Otto Spethmann himself is in the story. Perhaps that is why it works – at the beginning of the story, Otto has little interest or need for politics, and must quickly figure it out as he goes along – which makes it easy to identify with him.  

Parts of the novel are predictable, but there are so many characters and plotlines that converge, that there are still enough twists to satisfy. The characters themselves are great, and the setting itself is so full and interesting, that it is both an intelligent and thoroughly entertaining read.