The Clay Machine Gun

This flamboyantly imaginative story is set in Russia in the periods that mark the beginning and end of communism - 1914 and the early 1990s. Both are times of political emptiness and uncertaintly, when the old order is crumbling and the new is yet to be established. The protagonist, aptly named Peter Voyd, inhabits both periods - as a patient in a psychiatric hospital in the 1990s, and in his dream state, as Petka , a captain in the Red Army in 1914. The story begins with Peter Voyd in his Petka role arriving in Moscow to avoid the Cheka (secret police). He meets up with a friend by chance and goes back to his flat with him only to discover that the meeting is a trick and the Cheka are on their way. To his own surprise and even revulsion, he murders his 'friend', takes his cocaine and then quietly begins to play his favourite fugue in F by Mozart. Thus the gangster-like activity is offset by classical music and the sting is taken out of the threatening atmosphere of this tale either by a comic twist, or by a reference to classical culture. The possibility that Buddhist meditative practices or philosophical reasoning, or even popular culture in the form of soap operas, can be satisfactory ways out of the void is explored throughout. But no sooner does it seem that there really is a message about the author's belief in one or other system, than that belief is bucked with a sharp stab of self-parody. In this book existential anxiety and idiotic comedy vie for first place. Pelevin is a contradictory as his turbulent novel. Although he has a cult-like following in Russia, and is seen in the west as one of Russia's most important contemporary literary writers, the Russian literary establishment is divided and many think him a fraud. He is a recluse who has spent time in meditation in a Buddhist monastery, yet he enjoys the benefits of wealth and does not turn his back on western interviewers. This is his third book to be translated into English, and is a complex novel rich in ideas, comedy and literary tricks - a sort of nightmarish shuffling of Kafka's Metamorphosis and Joseph Heller's Catch 22. It is not to be missed. (Kirkus UK)