Characters in history
The Archivist's Story, by Travis Holland

James Topham
posted 13 March 2008

It seems strange to review The Archivist's Story as a Jewish text, since there’s little to make it a 'Jewish' book other than the fact Isaac Babel, the Russo-Jewish short story writer, looms so large in it. Certainly, the work exhibits a fine understanding of persecution – and its occasional nods to the sense of inertia that greeted rumours of the Holocaust spreading across Europe in the early years of the War are pointed - but these are nothing more than tiny murmurs. Rather one must judge it as it presents itself, as a historical novel written by a first-time author. On this basis it is a solid effort, but not one without its flaws and not, perhaps, deserving of the rapturous reception it is currently receiving.

The eponymous archivist is a man by the name of Pavel, who works at the very lowest level of the Soviet governmental structure on the eve of the Second World War. Despite his job title, his main purpose is not to preserve, but rather to slowly incinerate the increasingly widening canon of literary works that officialdom condemns. He is an ordinary man, no-one's idea of a revolutionary, and his only crime is to appropriate and preserve two stories by the author Isaac Babel and to hide them in his basement. Despite his seeming innocuousness, Pavel slowly begins to feel the closing grasp of the Great Purges surround him, his family and his friends. He also has to contend with grief at the loss of his wife, killed when saboteurs derailed her train, and the slow onset of dementia in his mother.

Holland has a good eye for historical detail and seems to have gathered to himself an impressive amount of learning on his specialist subject (a learning which he is only too ready to impart to his reader; sometimes, alas, by placing ill-conceived exposition in the mouths of his characters). He is also particularly strong in the way he unwinds the sense of fear and paranoia that attends totalitarianism, and particularly the institutionalised terror that was systemic during the worst periods of Stalin's rule. Early in the novel he seems to be in the business of demonizing those who work within the system of terror – his ambitious fellow archivist, his boss who all in the department know has blood on his hands – and yet as we move deeper into Pavel's world we realise this is only the first pass in a much more complex analysis.

Everyone in Pavel's novel is, in one way or another, a subject of the system. Whether they react to it by acquiescence, by outright defiance, or reject it in a more surreptitious way (as does Pavel), all the characters operate under the implicit assumption that they could be the system's next victims. Even those who get rich or grow powerful under Soviet rule live in fear as much as the next man of the arbitrariness of officialised terror. As such, the elusive inconclusiveness that Holland purposefully chooses to conclude his novel works well: he does not allow us the scene in which the hammer falls. Rather, we must live beyond the book's pages, as must Pavel, with the sense of impending dread, the fermata that suspends the existence of those living in the fear that every noise they hear is a car pulling up outside, and whose every moment may be the one in which they are taken.

If The Archivist's Story succeeds in evoking the historical situation of its setting, it is not such an aesthetic success. For Holland has not simply attempted a historical tract, he has tried to write a novel; he has tried to people it with characters and bring them to life through dialogue, and in presenting these people and their words he has attempted to likewise present some kind of insight into them and their situation. If this was a great novel of its kind, then this insignificant archivist's individual story would dissolve itself in the more widely human, the human would resonate within the historical, and the historical, in its turn, would gesture towards the universal. But far from illuminating the interrelatedness of all the different levels of his artistic creation, The Archivist's Story seems to be riven with gaps. Let me try to explain.

Holland writes his story at ground level; eschewing the temptation of an omniscient narrator, he tries to bring a vital immediateness to the events of Pavel's life (similarly, he also writes in that most fashionable of tenses, the present). But he is somewhat hoist on his own petard when his narrative collides with certain historical facts he fears the reader doesn’t know about. This leads to rather absurd exchanges such as when Pavel and the woman he sleeps with, still wrapped in a post-coital clinch, meditate on the coming war and thank their stars because, ‘At Least there is still the Non-Aggression Agreement’ (I remember the days lovers were just happy to always have had Paris).

The verisimilitude of Holland's characters' thoughts and dialogue is so disrupted by this blundering authorial interference that we are continually driven from feeling anything for them at all. And if we don't feel for these individual cases then Holland's whole thrust, to create an intimate portrayal of man under the conditions of totalitarianism, falls flat. We are constantly reminded that his characters are not human, not flesh, not soul, but are merely figments marshalled in aid of Holland's historical point. This leads to the greatest error a historical novelist can commit, to fail to pierce the translucent film between his reader and the past, and to leave his audience coldly watching events as abstractions, and not as life.

This effort from Holland is just a little mechanistic. It has all the components of a powerful novel – a historical setting, an existentialist hero, a quiet lyrical prose, and a plot in which nothing much goes anywhere. In fact it is the contemporary novel par excellence, and yet, like so many of his contemporaries, Holland never makes the genre more than the sum of its parts. The Archivist's Story is a decent book, and technically well put together. But there is no fire in Holland's pen, and no life in the people who populate his setting. It should be filed away, I think, under G – for Good First Try.