Ekaterina Sedia’s The Secret History of Moscow is almost certainly a good book. Unfortunately I can’t be more definite because I am allergic to its prose and therefore didn’t actually like it.
It’s Moscow in the 1990s, and all over the city, people are turning into birds and flying away. Galina’s sister is one of the missing, and as Galina searches for her, she meets Yakov, a police officer, and Fyodor, an alcoholic street artist. The book cycles between their points of view as they find themselves in an underground Moscow populated by desparate humans and exiled myths.
This should be right up my alley, since I like urban fantasy and works with a strong sense of place. (Also, the author was sensible at and after a vexing con panel last year.) But the first time I tried to read it, I didn’t even finish chapter two: I and the prose seemed to be such a bad match that I could hardly grasp what was going on.
I put it aside for Ragamuffin and then tried it again this Friday. Unfortunately, I should perhaps have considered that a day in which I spent the entire morning dog-walk thinking, “I’m ready for winter to be over, already,” was perhaps not the optimal time to read a book set in Moscow. At any rate, this time I did manage to extract meaning from the prose, but my allergy to it remained.
For instance, as Galina, Yakov, and Fyodor explore the underground Moscow, they meet a number of characters and hear their stories. Because I couldn’t sink into the prose, I experienced these stories not as a rich exploration of myth à la The Orphan’s Tales, but as vexing interruptions of the quest for Galina’s missing sister. In addition, I didn’t like two of the three point-of-view characters and can’t tell if I was supposed to; and I found the story’s final resolution deeply troubling.
I can see that this book has virtues: its exploration of Russia’s past and present, its concern for those forgotten and displaced, perhaps even its undercutting of its own quest format. And the prose is much-praised by people who aren’t me. But for whatever reason—the weather, the cold that I wasn’t quite over—this is just not a book for me.