The Light and the Dark, by Mikhail Shishkin, trans from Russian by Andrew Bromfield (A Review by Helen McClory)

368 pgs/£14.44

The Light and the Dark is an epistolary novel – as soon as I opened the book and caught on to that, I thought of the 18th, 19th century. I thought, uncharitably, I was in for turgid romance. Or Dracula. But reading was another matter – there was the whiplash to deal with, of being thrown into the claustrophobic heart of the story, and there was the sparking, glorious prose.

The story is a love story of two sweethearts separated and writing back and forth to one another, recounting their happy moments and their present discomforts and biting loneliness. The lovers are Volodenka, a soldier in an unnamed, but clearly not modern conflict, and Sashenka, the young woman who waits at home. Here she recounts their time at their dachas in the countryside, where they met:

And the smells from the garden! So rich and dense, like fine particles saturating the air. You could pour those smells into a cup like strong tea.

And everything all around has only one thing on its mind – I simply walk through the field or the forest and absolutely everyone tries his very best to pollinate or inseminate me. My socks are just covered in grass seeds.

And remember, we found a hare in the grass with its legs cut off by a mowing machine.

Brown-eyed cows.

Little goat nuts lying on the path.

Our pond – murky on the bottom with blooming slush, full of frogspawn. Silver carp butting at the sky. I climb out of the water and pluck the weed off myself.

I lay down to sunbathe and covered my face with my singlet, the wind rustles like starched linen. And suddenly there’s a ticklish feeling in my navel, and it’s you pouring a thin stream of sand onto my stomach out of your fist.

The detail is thick, romantic with both a small and large r, but this feels valid for what lovers, nineteenth century, early twentieth perhaps, would write. They would see the exuberance of nature as a mirror to their own currently unfulfilled desires. And when Volodenka writes of the landscapes of war, he appends them with qualifiers of love. War and distance can only be endured because of the continued existence of Sashenka in the world.

Now, here is what might be a spoiler but for the fact the publisher eludes to it on the back cover of my copy: how can life be endured by Sashenka, once Volodenka is no longer in the world?

Shishkin shows us – life goes on, hope dies and is through time, reborn to die again. Life is a constant cycle. Sashenka continues to write to Volodenka, though she slowly stops using her terms of endearment and starts telling him, not of the past, but of her almost unbearable present. As if in protest of his ending, Volodenka’s letters continue.

My Sashenka!

I don’t know when I’ll be able to send this letter, but I’ll write it anyway. So many different things have happened in recent days and it’s only now that I can have a quiet talk with you. I’ll tell you what’s been happening to me in a moment, but first the most important thing – you are very dear to me. And the longer we are not together, the more powerfully I sense you.

I feel you beside me so strongly, it seems impossible to me that you can’t feel it.

We’re in Tientsin. How long have we been here already? Only three days. But it feels like three years. Or thirty-three.

War continues and his suffering becomes his present, a recursive loop of bloodshed and random acts of cruelty and destruction to which he must be witness. It’s significant that Volondenka mentions his sense of closeness to Sashenka in the letter immediately after she has informed him, with platonic warmth, that she has met someone else after a long period of mourning. The narrowness of scope, centring with tunnel vision on Volodenka’s experience was a strange jolt, and I couldn’t quite decide whether it broke my heart or not. After all, the character of Volodenka cannot respond to this loss – it has become purely Sashenka’s narrative. Except, except. Volodenka continues to write.

This choice to continue Volodenka removes the pressures of epistolary novels – which generally must move forward in a linear, if perhaps tidal fashion, given the nature of letter-writing – and replaces them with the slight oddness of the lover’s voice calling in the void. The question arises of who is reading the letters? Sashenka, very slowly, over the course of her life? Or are we being placed in the role of the young relative, poking through a trunk full of old correspondences? This is a minor quibble really. What Shishkin has managed to achieve is a portrait of the finest filaments of love and connection enduring after death in a way that is neither stagnant nor supernatural. Beautiful and devastating in equal measure, The Light and the Dark is ideal for reading on those days it seems it shall be winter forever, when we need reminding that whatever happens in our lives – love, death, every countless mundane ache – the faint sketch of every blossom remains on the barest tree.

Helen McClory was raised in both rural and urban Scotland. She has lived in Sydney and New York City and is currently to be found in the South Side of Edinburgh overlooking a prehistoric cliff face. The manuscript of her first novel KILEA won the Unbound Press Best Novel Award 2011, and publication is currently being sought for it. To keep the wire steady, Helen is working on a second novel about the intersections of love, failure and technology set in New York, New Mexico and Cornwall. Progress on this at: http://schietree.wordpress.com/