Book review: Agent 6

WHEN Tom Rob Smith's first novel, Child 44, was published in 2008, his one million new readers were informed that he was born in 1979, too young for such a brilliant, self- assured, atmospheric, not to mention literary page-turner.

AGENT 6

BY TOM ROB SMITH

Simon & Schuster, 560pp, 16.99

He even attracted the attention of the Booker judges, who included the novel in that year's long list. Now three years older and two books later, he delivers the final part of his Soviet trilogy and though it disappoints slightly this is more a slip from "first class" to "very good", one many other authors would covet.

Over the course of three novels Smith has created a fascinating character capable of carrying the weight of the dark years of the Soviet Union and all its murders, disappearances and deceit. Leo Demidov began in Child 44 as a true believer in the Stalinist state, a secret policeman capable of colluding in torture and executions, all for the greater good of the Soviet brotherhood. Yet he began down a dark road to redemption when faced with the question of how you investigate the murder of children in a "utopia" where no crime exists.

While the first book was based on the real life crimes of serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, the second novel, The Secret Speech (2009) was built around the brief flowering of freedom following Stalin's death and Nikita Khrushchev's speech in which he denounced the crimes of the previous era. Demidov's two daughters are adopted, their parents having been executed by his men - and the girls' loyalty is not to their new papa: Zoya, the eldest, takes to holding a knife to her father's throat while he sleeps. Yet in order to protect them he fought through the gulags into which he himself had consigned so many.

Yet what Smith achieved then appears to have been lost in Agent 6. The new book pinballs between 1950, New York in 1965 and Afghanistan in 1980, where Demidov is now working as a military adviser training those Afghanistan citizens wishing to side with the Soviets against the US-backed mujahadeen.

During the section set in New York in 1965 his wife and two daughters are struck by a mysterious tragedy while the girls are singing at a goodwill concert. Demidov had been refused permission to leave the country and accompany them and at the heart of his troubles lies Agent 6.

To unspool the plot any further would be to spoil the considerable excitement that builds up, better instead to consider Smith's place on the shelf of Soviet-inspired fiction. Well, I'd certainly place him ahead of Martin Amis's gulag novel House of Meetings and Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park, but firmly behind John Le Carr's many masterpieces.

For me, Agent 6, is a little looser than his explosive debut, by dint of its broad timeframe and multiple settings. Yet this is not to deny him fine achievement. Cold War novels have too often been populated by cardboard characters lumbering through scenes, and it is a testament to Smith's considerable sensitivity as a writer that Leo Demidov feels like he walked straight off the pages of Orlando Figes's masterpiece of biographical fear, The Whisperers.

The curtain may have fallen on this particular dark tale, but it has been well and truly raised on a new talent who looks set to be entertaining and moving us for many decades to come.