Seventeen year old Lev lives alone in Leningrad. It’s 1942 and the siege is in full swing; Lev’s mother has left the city with his younger sister. Lev’s father, a renowned poet, has been dispatched by the NKVD years ago into an unmarked grave, and so Lev lives alone in his apartment building, with people who share his fate but that aren’t his friends. There is little more to do for Lev than read chess manuals and focus on the all-encompassing hunger he feels. One night, he spots a German paratrooper crashing into the city; he is caught looting the body and subsequently arrested. He ends up in a prison cell with a flamboyant, theatrical soldier named Kolya. To their surprise, they aren’t immediately executed; instead, they are brought to a Colonel, who gives them a seemingly simple assignment. The Colonel’s daughter is getting married. She wants a wedding cake, so they’ll need eggs. If Kolya and Lev can find a dozen eggs, they will be released, and so the pair set off to find eggs in a city where people are starving to a degree where they’ll boil down books to eat the glue.
I’d never heard of City of Thieves before. It was published in 2008 and it went entirely under my radar. I’m surprised at that, because it’s really very good. As with most good novels, the plot and the characters are excellent. The idea of going around finding eggs is a bit ludicrous, like a very bleak easter egg hunt, but Benioff manages to sell it well enough. And it’s not exactly quaint; early on in their quest, the two run into a man who sells human body parts for meat, and there is a side plot of four young women, locked in a farmhouse, who serve as the personal brothel for a squadron of Nazis (we find out later what happened to the fifth girl, and it’s every bit as bleak as you might imagine). Corpses of entire families line the streets. The world is silent and cold and unforgiving. To Lev, quiet and morose, this is fait accompli; Kolya, on the other hand, goes to great lengths to make things work, to remain optimistic.
And it’s the characters that really drive the novel. Kolya is a clown, but never strays into the ludicrous. He chats, barters, entertains, wins people over, gets them to tell him things they might not have shared with the taciturn Lev. And Kolya knows how the world works, teaches Lev to look for clues when people don’t say what they really mean. Lev, in turn, is brave in that way that teenagers frequently are: quietly and reluctantly. The war has aged him, but at heart he’s still a boy who’s awkward around girls and who thinks everyone else is smarter than him.
The novel isn’t perfect; I honestly debated myself whether to give this four or five stars, because I really did enjoy it a lot, and the bittersweet ending was predictable but well done, and in keeping with the black humour and cynicism that permeates the book (though I could’ve done without the coda, which didn’t really fit the tone of the rest of the book). Benioff is a screenwriter by trade, and the novel has an almost filmic feel to it in the episodic way that it is paced. But there’s also something clinical about it; I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it almost feels like a screenwriting exercise. The one prominent female character in the novel is ballsy but also falls a little flat, and mostly serves as a tool for the character development of the main character.
Still, I very much enjoyed this novel and I’d wholehearted recommend it to people who want to read something exciting that also has a little depth to it.