The Secrets we Kept by lara Prescott

The times 5 october 2019

The Secrets We Kept is a novel about a novel. Lara Prescott has written a fictionalised account of the battle to publish Doctor Zhivago and its repercussions, and the CIA subterfuge in getting it read by Russians.

Edmund Wilson wrote in The New Yorker in 1958 that “Doctor Zhivago will, I believe, come to stand as one of the great events in man’s literary and moral history”. The Kremlin did not agree. It suppressed Boris Pasternak’s novel and it was not published in the Soviet Union until 1988.

Doctor Zhivago is the story of the physician and poet Yuri Zhivago and his struggles in the turbulent and tragic decades of the first half of the 20th century, spanning the Tsarist age, the Bolshevik revolution and the oppressive Stalin years. He falls passionately in love with Lara Antipova (memorably played by Julie Christie in David Lean’s 1965 film), but woven through the epic love story is a disillusionment with revolutionary ideas.

That is the reason why it was not published in the Soviet Union. Instead, a copy was smuggled out and published in the West in 1957; the next year Pasternak was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. The CIA seized upon the book as a perfect vehicle for challenging communist thought and smuggled a Russian-language edition back into the Soviet Union.

Pasternak was considered a “cloud-dweller” by Stalin, which may have been one reason why he escaped the gulag or death, fates meted out to so many of his contemporaries. Another theory is that Stalin admired his translations of Georgian poetry. Either way, because Pasternak was protected, others had to be punished for his writings, which embarrassed the authorities. Pasternak’s lover Olga Ivinskaya, the model for the fictional Lara, was twice sent to labour camps, spending seven years imprisoned.

There was hype surrounding Prescott’s debut even before it was published. Rights to it have been sold in 30 countries and 200,000 copies have been printed in the US alone. The film rights have been sold to the producers of La La Land and The Night Manager and the actress Reese Witherspoon chose it as the September read for her influential online book club.

It has also made headlines for other reasons. Anna Pasternak, the author’s great-niece, claims that The Secrets We Kept has plagiarised her nonfiction work about Ivinskaya, Lara: The Untold Love Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago.

Leaving that aside, there are other problems. It is bold to write a novel about the power of literature because, inevitably, this puts the reader on high alert as to the quality of your prose. Prescott’s writing is bewilderingly flat and her observations clichéd. A black woman typist working in the CIA in the 1950s “didn’t have a chip on her shoulder; it was more like a cement block”. When Olga is finally released from the labour camp and makes love with Boris after all this time, she reflects: “We came together like crashing boulders that echoed across Moscow.” Another character, devastated by heartbreak, says: “The loss came over me like a lead blanket.” And on the clichés roll.

Potentially dramatic storylines are wasted opportunities: two women in the CIA embark on a passionate affair with dreadful consequences, but their relationship never quite rings true. The most interesting plotline concerns an experienced femme fatale-type spy who is sexually assaulted by a colleague, then ousted from the service, but this is under-explored too.

Prescott says that her novel contains direct descriptions and quotes from first-hand accounts of the events she has fictionalised, which include 99 memos and reports relating to the Zhivago mission that the CIA released in 2014. This may explain some of her heavy-footed prose, but sadly can’t excuse it.

This review first appeared in The Times