A cross-cultural crisis

If you were a Martian, whiling away the time on an intergalactic beach holiday by reading an account of the Cuban missile crisis, you could be forgiven for dismissing it as wildly implausible fiction. All the blockbuster ingredients are there: the clash of superpowers, one led by the clean-cut American hero, the other by the fat Ukrainian with bad teeth, the military hardware amassing in the Caribbean (nice location), the split-second timing, not to mention the prospect of the end of the world. As a setting for a novel it’s worthy of a Robert Harris-style humdinger, called, no doubt, Cuba, or Missile, or even just Crisis.

Instead, rather surprisingly, here we find Katherine Bucknell taking up the challenge in this novel set in Moscow, October 1962. As a setting it could not be further from the intimate analysis of a failing marriage in her first book, Canarino, and she has not contented herself with using the crisis simply as a backdrop. Both Khrushchev and Kennedy make cameo appearances, along with KGB and CIA agents, Russian dissidents, and even Balanchine and the stars of the New York City Ballet, who were performing in Moscow that very week.

At the heart of the novel is a relationship, a cross-cultural marriage that echoes the shenanigans over Cuba. John is a straight-up American diplomat, honourable but bemused by Russia. Nina, his wife, is pinched between the two worlds — American, yet born in the USSR, the daughter of an idealistic engineer who worked on the Moscow Metro. Nina is bombarded by emotions on her return to Russia — horror, shame, fear — which Bucknell dissects with exhaustive precision. Around her circle people who are interested in her unique position — spooks

at the embassy with tasks for her to carry out, ballet dancers for whom she interprets, and her former friends, with whom she longs to make contact.