The Half Life of Valery K: THE TIMES HISTORICAL FICTION BOOK OF THE MONTH

Product Information

I wouldn't recommend this title as a first read if you aren't familiar with Pulley's work. If that's the case, go for The Watchmaker of Filigree Street or The Kingdoms. But every one of her books is worth reading. She has a remarkable ability to create imperfect characters, caught up in their own inner turmoil, that the reader can't help but care about.

He forced himself to look at her properly. He had never liked looking anyone full in the face. It felt as invasive as poking them in the chest, and the instinct not to do it was powerful, even if he was surrounded by people who insisted it was the polite thing.

It’s one of those awkward ones where I did still like the book, but it has parts which I disliked on a spectrum ranging from slightly to intensely. And I never thought this would be something I’d say about a Natasha Pulley book, but here we are. If anyone had told me I’d be mesmerized by a book about radiation and biochemistry and terms like curies, millicuries, plutonium and polonium, I’d have told them they were crazy. And yet, here I am, gushing about such a book! As for the novel, it’s very good. I adored Valery and was very invested in his plight. Pulley has an easy way of storytelling – her prose flows nicely and the plot is compelling. She even manages to make the science in the novel interesting and understandable.

Natasha Pulley’s whole thing is like M/M interracial romances in exotic (to a white British woman) locales, usually with a very plot-heavy timey wimey/conspiracy/adventure element which is very fun! Except each book also features her bizarre internal battle with signalling she is a feminist who thinks British colonialism is bad…….all while brutally killing off every woman that gets in the way of said romance, and also having a strange nationalist element (e.g. France winning the Napoleonic Wars leads to a despotic future where white slavery exists and the poor English people having to reinstate the good future where…..normal slavery exists). This never bothered me that much in the past because, whatever, I don’t take her seriously and I loved derangement but THIS book was beyond the pale and it didn’t even have the grace to be enjoyable!! From the author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and The Kingdoms, an epic Cold War novel set in a mysterious town in Soviet Russia with a slow burn romance at its hearts. Without delving into big spoilers, I found the latter parts of the book a repeat of what's been done before in Pulley's previous work, and not even an imaginative twist of them. I think these issues come up time and time again because so much of the focus is on the eventual happiness of the main pairing, even at the expense of the side characters (who are usually women). They have to contort themselves to fit that narrative. Sometimes it works, but more often than not, their plotlines are rather reduced to clichés to make way for the couple. Again, he wanted to ask what was going on; but if she slammed his fingers in the door, his bones would turn to powder.Valery fits into the mold of the classic Pulley protagonist: intelligent, burns with a quiet inner fire, and desperately alone in this world. Whose only want is a sliver of a moment when the shadow they're talking to isn't just their own (though clutching a pillow fort in bed because he can't fall asleep from the sheer aloneness of everything is a whole new level). With him we also get a subtle but empathic representation of neurodivergence and nonbinary identity. For the life of me I can’t get it why Natasha thought it was a good idea to write a story set in a country and at a time period she knows nothing about. She could have made it an imaginary, Soviet-inspired place and it would have probably worked, but as it is it’s just ridiculous and frankly obnoxious.

The characters were distinct and well-drawn and made me want to see them succeed and survive. I learned a lot about radiation, even if I didn't understand it all, and it appalled me to know this kind of thing has taken place at various times around the world. In 1963, in a Siberian prison, former nuclear specialist Valery Kolkhanov has mastered what it takes to survive: the right connections to the guards for access to food and cigarettes, the right pair of warm boots, and the right attitude toward the small pleasures of life so he won’t go insane. But one day, all that changes: Valery’s university mentor steps in and sweeps him from the frozen camp to a mysterious unnamed city. It houses a set of nuclear reactors, and surrounding it is a forest so damaged it looks like the trees have rusted from within. I imagine more than a few readers will be turned off by the moral compromises the more sympathetic characters make, and I get it. But I don’t think Pulley is condoning anyone’s behavior – far from it. Rather, she presents situations in which good people make really awful decisions and explains how they get to those decisions. No one is off the hook here.Inside the laboratory, Dr. Resovskaya briefs the scientists about the Lighthouse and why the area was intentionally exposed to radiation by the Soviet government in 1957: to study the effects it might have on an entire ecosystem. Excited for the work but confused by the facility's area radiation maps containing curious and contradictory measurements, Valery sets out into the forests to set up some experiments. When he discovers a hospital-gowned body floating in a nearby marsh, Valery and Shenkov work together to find answers. But as Valery goes deeper down the rabbit hole, memories of a painful past and one monstrous act frustrate his ability to trust even previously close associates.