The Gentle Axe Book

As a native speaker of Russian, I was suspicious of this novel at first. When Roger Morris, an Englishman, pulled out Porfiry Petrovich, the investigating magistrate of Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment," from his literary hereafter, I was afraid of getting into yet another Potemkin village. And, of course, Dostoevsky is mine. What right do foreigners have to exploit his characters? After all, in their ignorance of Russia, they often create what we call "a spreading cranberry," a tall story.

I'm glad I was wrong. The result of Morris' impeccable work is a literary mystery, a matreshka doll with more sequentially smaller dolls nested inside than there are peas in a pod.


[Read the rest of my review in The Literary Review magazine]