Fiction:Zugzwang, Ronan Bennett's fast-paced and compelling new work, was originally serialised in weekly instalments in the Observer. The author's experimentation with a 19th-century format has left its mark on this tautly structured novel.
Its economy and recourse to rapidly delineated moments of climax may be attributed to the need to elicit and sustain readers' interest from week to week. This speed and sense of mounting intrigue are equally effective ploys for engaging the audience of the full-length novel which has now been published. Bennett adeptly draws us into the milieu of pre-revolutionary St Petersburg in March 1914 and immerses us in the political conspiracies that bind a complex network of figures together.
Zugzwang is a literary novel that expertly interfuses numerous different genres, including the thriller, the psychoanalytical case history, the detective story and the chess narrative, in the manner of Vladimir Nabokov and Stefan Zweig. The central protagonist, Otto Spethmann, is a Jewish psychoanalyst who is unwittingly implicated in a number of overlapping political plots interlinking socialist dissidents and violently repressive reactionaries. Like many of Bennett's heroes, he is a reluctant revolutionary. He is doggedly committed to discovering the truth but his preferred means of analysis are those of a dedicated Freudian who delves into buried emotions and memories or of a chess player who objectively weighs up moves and strategies.
Chess, as the title indicates, is one of the presiding metaphors of this novel. Zugzwang describes a position in which a player is forced to move while recognising that anything he does will only make things worse. At the start of the novel, Spethmann finds himself in just such a fix, in an ongoing game that he is playing with Kopelzon, his violinist friend. Inevitably, the positionings on the chess board begin to mirror his real-life condition. Readers are encouraged to follow and anticipate this game as successive chapters provide us with diagrams of the unfolding moves.
The historical apparatus of the novel also hinges on chess. The performance of Rozenthal, a Polish Jew - who happens to be a patient of Spethmann - at the St Petersburg chess conference provides the occasion for the political intrigues and assassinations that dominate the plot. Spethmann and his daughter are accused of involvement with a cell of revolutionaries who are plotting to kill the Tsar. The experience of being imprisoned and interrogated becomes the tipping point for Bennett's hero who desperately seeks to exonerate himself and to prove his innocence.
His attachment to his daughter and his affair with Anna, a patient of his who is troubled by recurring dreams from her childhood, make such vindication impossible. Spethmann seeks to solve the mysteries surrounding these women while attempting to elude Lychev and other members of the Okhrana, the Russian secret police, who have him under surveillance. The apolitical stance he occupies at the start of the novel proves increasingly untenable as does his suppression of his Jewish background.
As in all of Bennett's fictions, romance enmeshes the hero in the fundamental power struggles of his society. The traumas of the patients that Spethmann muses over turn out to be rooted in political not sexual conflicts. The unexpected twists of fate that mark the denouement serve to complicate our sense of early 20th-century Russia, poised both on the edge of revolution and a decline into totalitarianism. A key question raised by the novel is how political justice can be achieved in a world in which revolution shades into terrorism and dreams of liberation are corrupted by brutal imperialist regimes or by bourgeois self-interest.
Ronan Bennett is that rare thing, a resolutely political writer who refuses to relinquish the possibility of a just society. His subtly drawn narrative uses oblique allegory to inveigle us into a contemplation of key contemporary issues such as the political contexts of terrorism and the oppressiveness of a society that uses surveillance to maintain the status quo. In Zugzwang, Bennett with characteristic finesse supplies us at once with an engrossing thriller and a historical romance that suggestively examines the workings of power and the utopian desire for justice and equality.
Anne Fogarty is Professor of Joyce Studies at University College Dublin
Zugzwang By Ronan Bennett Bloomsbury, 278pp. €14.99