The Book Tower

Last year I was very impressed with Tom Rob Smith’s Soviet thriller Child 44. The novel reached the Booker longlist, much to the horror of many critics who thought a commercial crime thriller far too lowbrow. I found this view somewhat sniffy; Child 44 is generally a well written and intriguing crime novel. My only criticism was in how Smith all too eagerly set things up at the end for a sequel. Now the sequel has come.

And oh dear oh dear. Whilst I defended Child 44 against those who accused Smith of being a Dan Brown in the waiting, I have no defence whatsoever for The Secret Speech. This is a book clumsily written and so preposterous that you’ll want to throw it across the room (or in my case out of the hotel room window). Where Child 44 ended with the whispers of a follow up, Smith must have sat around doing very little until his publishers started banging in his door and demanding it. It stinks of a book written in great haste, and one that is little more that a hastily sketched out screenplay in the guise of a hardback.

I don’t normally write bad reviews, but Smith has annoyed me greatly because I’m convinced that he does have talent, and there are parts of The Secret Speech that show what a better book it might have been (albeit only one character convincingly portrayed: the captain of the prison ship that features was very well written for example, which made me question what went wrong with the rest of the book). Otherwise there are too many big scenes that cry out for the attention of the cinema; the detonation of a church, a storm and a revolt at sea, a chase through the sewers.

The Secret Speech catches up with Leo Demidov from Child 44, now heading a unique homicide division (unique because Stalinist Russia had previously denied the existence of anything like murder in their regime where murder was the privilege of the state). Leo and his wife are also coping with adoption (the two girls they took care of after their parents were murdered in the first book). A series of murders surround both publication of Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denouncing Stalin and the incarceration of a former priest arrested years before by a younger Leo. One of Leo’s daughters is subsequently kidnapped and the ransom involves Leo posing as a prisoner in the Gulags in order to help the priest escape.

I can’t really go on as the plot becomes sillier and sillier. In prison Leo meets a crazy governor who reminds of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. There’s a tough female villain who heads up a Russian gang of cardboard criminals and a twist that looks like it’s going to save the novel but then fails; it all ends stupidly. So unfortunately, and it pains me to say this, The Secret Speech really does to prove that Tom Rob Smith is a Dan Brown in the waiting. And that might even be an insult to Dan Brown; The Da Vinci Code is a much better book.