Enchantments by Kathryn Harrison, a review

The book: Not quite what I expected, but worth the read

The author: Worth reading again

Review:

A number of years ago, I sat in a classroom and watched a movie that chronicled the last days of the Romanov dynasty. I do not recall the name of the movie, and given that I only watched it once probably twenty years ago, I hope I shall be forgiven my memory lapse. I remember feeling horrified at the end scene, where Russia's former Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, and the rest of their family were herded into a room to wait for their supposed rescue, only to be faced with a firing squad.

I decided right then and there I never wanted to enter politics.

A few days ago, I was looking over our library's new book section, and picked up Enchantments to try and see what its subject matter was. I thought perhaps it might be a fantasy book, complete with magic, dragons, and some insane quest. Instead, the book jacket informed me it was about those same end days I had once watched during class. However, this was not a typical novel about the Romanov family. It was told mostly from the perspective of Masha, who was Rasputin's daughter. Rasputin, I remembered, was a mystic healer, a womanizer, and someone who reportedly had control over the Tsarina Alexandra because of his ability to provide relief to her son, who suffered from hemophilia. Historical fiction about an enigma of a man, set in an interesting, if exceedingly bloody, time period? That sounded intriguing.

The first thing I had to wrap my brain around was a spelling of names to which I was unaccustomed. Alexei, as I remembered Nicholas' and Alexandra's son, was now dubbed Alyosha. Nicholas II himself was now Nikolay. I do not know whether Harrison's spelling is more accurate or not. I found myself accepting these differences without question as an obviously talented author wove her story.

Masha tells the vast majority of the story, and it is not always in chronological order. I felt vaguely as if I was reading a more upscale version of the movie Pulp Fiction. I knew pretty much everyone was going to die. That much had been taught to me in history classes years ago. In this novel, the reader jumps back and forth in time and it really only gives you a good indication of where you were in history by who is alive and who is dead. A number of the stories Masha spins to entertain Alyosha deal with her dead father's life. Others exist in the timeline in which she is telling those stories. Still other narration jumps ahead to Masha's life after the tsar and his family have been murdered. Then there are stories that are told afterwards, but exist in the space between previously discussed stories. (If John Travolta's character had suddenly appeared exiting one of the water closets mentioned in the book, I probably would not have been surprised.) However, instead of frustrating me (as Pulp Fiction does) with its lack of a coherent timeline, Harrison kept me glued to each and every page as I tried to process the interwoven tales.

I have two notes of caution for any reader of Enchantments. First of all, this novel discusses things of a sexual nature from time to time. This should not have surprised me, given what I already knew about Rasputin's life, but it somehow did. I did feel the author took quite a bit of liberty detailing Alyosha's interest and pursuit of sex, given that he was still a child when he died, but perhaps there is a historical basis for their mention. I honestly don't know. Secondly, when reading a book about a particularly bloody period in a country's history, expect depictions of violence. If someone was shot, expect to read where they were shot, how the bullet wound looked, and what further violence was perpetrated against the shot individual or his or her corpse.

I suspect a heck of a lot of research was done when writing this novel, although there was no "Works Cited" page (or equivalent) to help me figure out where history left off and the creative mind of Kathryn Harrison started. Perhaps, this is one of the reasons this novel was as spell-binding as it was.