Child 44

A very short review of Child 44, a potboiler which mysteriously made its way onto the Booker shortlist last year.

'Child 44' is a decent enough debut; a thriller which checks all the boxes. It is not, though, a Booker Prize-winning novel, and it is rather surprising to find it on this list. The writing is rather clumsy and lumbering: characters do not have depth so much as lists of attributes, and Smith has never heard of the writer's rule 'show, don't tell'. Meanwhile, the historical detail is on occasion innacurate - even the KGB (which is for some reason referred to as the MGB throughout) didn't execute 'several hundreds a day'. Indeed, the vigour with which Smith attacks the Soviet system is curiously anachronistic; in 1962, this might have been a powerful political statement, but it certainly isn't now. Although not an unqualified disaster, neither can this book rightly be called a success.