February 23, 2002

Helen Dunmore has written eight first-rate novels exploring the intricacies of contemporary family life but now she has gone for something completely different and one can imagine the conversation she must have had with her agent and publisher: ‘ A historical novel, Helen? And about the siege of Leningrad when a million people died of starvation, surely not.’ They must have given her dire warnings about alienating her established audience but obviously to no avail because here it is; a harrowing account of how five people endured the iron ring which the Germans put round the city slowly throttling it for 900 momentous days during the second world war.

Helen Dunmore wrote it apparently because she has been fascinated by Russia ever since her first Russian lesson at fourteen. And it is this fascination and huge understanding which emanates from this novel which really makes your hair stand on end, fear rise in your throat and the ache of hunger become almost palpable. But most of all it’s the bitter and intense cold, which grips the imagination. How do people live in ordinary times with temperatures miles below freezing let alone with no heat, food or light. Helen Dunmore brilliantly evokes the whole ghastly, horrific time.

I was in St Petersburg recently. People still remember and talk about those times. There is an awe-inspiring monument which beautifully captures the agony of those days. It is a huge underground space and has just the right balance of solemnity and outrage that people should suffer so needlessly.

Helen Dunmore’s main character is a young woman who has been looking after her five year old brother since their mother’s death. They both live with their father’s, a disillusioned writer. After the siege begins a friend of her fathers, an actress, comes and lives with them as does a young doctor. How they all cleave together during that time is spelt out in all its grim details. The bread queues, the pitiful amount of food available, their gradually wasting bodies and their then almost complete lack of energy when even walking downstairs is a supreme effort. The city too is described like a character with its moods and seasons and the huge passionate feeling that its inhabitants have for it.

For this is the burden of Helen Dunmore’s novel — that people have a tremendous will to survive, not just for themselves, or their immediate family and friends but for the whole human race. It is great stuff, if you can bear the sheer hell that Dunmore summons up from the depth of her reading and the workings of her extraordinary imagination. I was shaken by it.

The siege
By Helen Dunmore
Viking
ISBN 0-670-89718-3. 304pp. £16.99

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)