Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life, by D.M. Thomas (Abacus, £10.99 in UK)
Just how important a writer Solzhenitsyn is/was has not been answered yet; my own feeling is that he is rather a poor novelist but a powerful polemicist. Perhaps his ultimate importance is a historical one - he blew the gaff on a system which not only had failed, but could no longer hide the evidence for its failure and its wrongdoing from the world. Solzhenitsyn seems to have cast himself in the role of a spiritual prophet and secular "holy man" on almost Dostoyevskyan lines, and certainly he suffered for his convictions as much as any novelistic hero. There remains, however, something indefinably smug about him as well as a vein of moralistic hysteria which becomes trying when you have heard the same, rather simplistic message over and over. His moral courage remains undeniable, and Thomas shows the deep, personalised odium which the Soviet Establishment felt for him almost to the end. This long, rather turgidly written biography is not easy or digestible reading.