Archangel

By: Robert Harris

Narrated by: Anton Lesser

Archangel tells the story of four days in the life of Fluke Kelso, a dissipated, middle-aged former Oxford historian who is in Moscow to attend a conference on newly opened Soviet archives.

One night Kelso is visited in his hotel room by an old NKVD officer, a former bodyguard of the secret police chief, Lavrentii Beria. The old man claims to have been at Stalin's dacha on the night Stalin had his fatal stroke, and to have helped Beria steal the dictator's private papers, among them a notebook. Kelso decides to use his last morning in Moscow to check out the old man's story.

But what starts as an idle enquiry in the Lenin Library soon turns into a murderous chase across night-time Moscow and up to northern Russia - to the vast forest near the White Sea resort of Archangel, where the final secret of Josef Stalin has been hidden for almost half a century. Archangel combines the imaginative sweep and dark suspense of Fatherland with the meticulous historical detail of Enigma.

The result is a classic adventure story of great intelligence in the tradition of Conrad, Greene and le Carre.

©2004 Robert Harris (P)2004 Random House Audiobooks

A little 'dramatic' for my taste

The story here isn't too bad - it's not great literature, but sometimes you're in the mood for a disposable thriller - but I don't think Anton Lesser was the best choice as narrator.

I've liked Anton Lesser before - he was particularly good with Iain Banks' 'The Algebraist' - but I found him a little over-dramatic here, and I found myself wondering if his characterizations were really what the author had in mind. For example, there's a US TV producer character who Lesser portrays as a buffoon (the British de facto position for flashy American entertainment people), but I don't think he's SUPPOSED to be a buffoon - because if he was, the main character wouldn't take him so seriously all the time.

Not terrible, but not a must-have, either.