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Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Dec 1998, 373 pages
Paperback:
Jan 2000, 415 pages
Archangel combines the imaginative sweep and dark suspense of Fatherland with the meticulous historical detail of Enigma. The result is Robert Harris's most compelling novel yet.
Present-day Russia is the setting for this stunning new novel from Robert Harris,
author of the bestsellers Fatherland and Enigma.
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 the 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 Lavrenty 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 inquiry in the Lenin Library soon turns into a murderous chase across
nighttime Moscow and up to northern Russia--to the vast forests near the White Sea port 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 Robert Harris's most compelling
novel yet.
To choose one's victims, to prepare one's plans minutely, to slake an implacable
vengeance, and then to go to bed . . . there is nothing sweeter in the world.
--J. V. Stalin, in conversation with Kamenev and Dzerzhinsky
Olga Komarova of the Russian Archive Service, Rosarkhiv, wielding a collapsible pink
umbrella, prodded and shooed her distinguished charges across the Ukraina's lobby toward
the revolving door. It was an old door, of heavy wood and glass, too narrow to cope with
more than one body at a time, so the scholars formed a line in the dim light, like
parachutists over a target zone, and as they passed her, Olga touched each one lightly on
the shoulder with her umbrella, counting them off one by one as they were propelled into
the freezing Moscow air.
Franklin Adelman of Yale went first, as befitted his age and status,
then Moldenhauer of the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, with his absurd double doctorate-...
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