Tangled Web UK Review July 2008
Documents Concerning Rubashov the Gambler by
Carl Johan Vallgren
pbk out July 08
(Vintage)
at £7.99
Vallgren was born in 1964, and is a singer/songwriter in his native Sweden as well as being a writer. His physical proximity to the Great Bear that is Russia must have influenced his thinking with this his second novel. The first, "The Horrific Sufferings of...Hercules Barefoot", was about a disfigured deaf-mute mind-reading dwarf who suffered many cruelties in his life. It was for some critics a picaresque adventure with little depth. The same cannot be said for this new novel.
Josef Rubashov is still a young man in 1899, but his obsession with gambling has estranged him from his family, and rendered him penniless. When he arranges to gamble for his soul with the bespectacled government clerk that is the Devil, even then he is not ganbling for money, but for the thrill. Inevitably, he loses, but his punishment is not being consigned to Hell. It is something far worse, though that is not apparent to him at the beginning. It seems that Hell has been full for many years, so the Devil has been consigning the souls he wins to another fate. Immortality. At first, Rubashov makes money by betting noone can burn a curious piece of paper. As it is his contract with the Devil, he knows it is incombustible. He also does the rounds of the clubs in St Petersburg where the dangerous game of Russian roulette is played. He always wins because he cannot die. Even marriage and a child seem to bring him happiness. Bt of course it is all fated to fall apart.
Rubashov eventually realises that to live forever is a curse, especially in the world he lives in. He drifts through all the horrors of the twentieth century, including serving on the Western Front in World War One, being in Berlin in 1933, and Northern Ireland in 1969. He meets Rasputin, Houdini (whom he puzzles with his ability to stay under water for longer than a normal man had a right to), and Aleister Crowley. He spends time hunting for the Devil to beg him to lift the curse of immortality, and meets in the process other immortals including Paracelsus, who is by then several hundred years old.
Vallgren’s odyssey is reminiscent of classic nineteenth century Russian chap book tales, running through the works of Gogol, right down to Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. It is redolent of the deepest of Russian gloom. And only serves to pick up that theme of Sartre’s that Hell is other people. There can be no worse Hell than to experience all the worst horrors perpetrated by human beings throughout the twentieth century.
(
Ian Morson
Author of Falconer books and short listed for 1999 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Dagger)
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