City of Thieves by David Benioff

David Benioff’s new novel, City of Thieves, tells the story of two young men—one in his teens and one just out of them—who are arrested during the siege of Leningrad and given a stark ultimatum: find a dozen eggs for the Colonel’s daughter’s wedding cake, or be shot. As they begin to search the ruined, starving city on their impossible quest, City of Thieves unfolds into an involving and well-told adventure, that suffers only from a distracting and unnecessary framing device.

David Benioff can write. There is proof on almost every page of City of Thieves, passages I want to show to my clients or bookmark for future use as examples. There’s no empty description here; everything is shown in terms of how it relates to the things around it, and to the story. See how he reminds us of his characters’ precarious physical state, not by bludgeoning us with repeated, shoehorned references, but by bringing it up where it’s relevant, and where we can see how it influences the story:

We ran for the stairway door, abandoning our firefighting tools, racing down the dark stairwell. We were fools, of course. A slip on one of those concrete steps, with no fat or muscle to cushion the fall, meant a broken bone, and a broken bone meant death.

This is much, much better than just peppering the text with synonyms for “skinny”. And as Lev and Kolya walk around the city, we see not just what they see, but how they see it and the impression it makes on them. (This is the sort of imagination and atmospheric detail that was missing from The Creator’s Map.)

We walked alongside the frozen Fontanka Canal, the ice littered with abandoned corpses, some covered with shrouds weighted down with stones, others stripped for their warm clothes, their white faces staring up at the darkening sky. The wind was beginning to wake for the night and I watched a dead woman’s long blond hair blow across her face. She had taken pride in that hair once, washed it twice a week, brushed it out for twenty minutes before going to bed. Now it was trying to protect her, to shield her decay from the eyes of strangers.

While his descriptions work together, so the scenes of the story flow neatly, one into the next. Perhaps he’s helped by his experience as a screenwriter (he wrote Troy, although I don’t remember that being particularly exceptional), but clearly David Benioff knows how to spin his ideas and his research into a coherent, cohesive world.

Speaking of Benioff’s research, there are several moments in the book that strongly reflect Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt (which is actually acknowledged as a key source at the back of the book). I’m thinking particularly of the scene in which the Germans test their Russian prisoners’ ability to read, which follows a scene in Kaputt so closely that one can almost see Malaparte hovering there in the corner of the courtyard, taking notes.

But while the story itself is a fine adventure, well told, there is a curious distraction in the form of a very brief first chapter, in which a writer called David visits his grandparents, and begins to ask his grandfather about his experiences in Russia during the war, which then leads into chapter one; essentially, the story is presented as being the experiences of Benioff’s grandfather.

The problem here isn’t the fact that it’s not true (this is a novel, after all), but that there’s absolutely no point to it. It feels like a half-cooked metafictional conceit that should have been trimmed from the first draft for redundancy. And I suspect the strange shadow it throws over the book may be at least partly to blame for the emotional detachment that other reviewers have complained about—because certainly the meat of the storytelling is engaging enough.

So why is it there? Are authors today afraid to spin a straight tale? Do they feel the need to pack some kind of post-modern tidbit into every book they write, to prove how “now” they are?

Perhaps the truth in this case is more an awareness of his market. During an interview in the Independent earlier this month, Benioff commented on what the article called “an unshakable prejudice in America against novels set abroad”:

“One of my best friends wrote a book and the first chapter was set in Poland. He got a note from his editor saying: ‘I wonder if we should move this opening chapter from Poland to the States? It’s hard for me to imagine that anyone will be interested in a story that takes place so far away.’ An editor at a major publishing house.” Benioff shakes his head and says that he told his friend to send the editor a letter beginning: “In a galaxy far, far away…”

While he may dismiss the idea in the interview, I really can’t see another reason for the presence of that first chapter; Benioff seems to be trying to comfort the reader by offering some connection between the story and America, the story and today, and (most uncomfortably), the story and himself.

There is one other possible explanation: maybe David Benioff is just frightened of beginnings. Certainly, he’s put considerable energy into both of the book’s opening lines. The first, introductory chapter, begins My grandfather, the knife fighter, killed two Germans before he was eighteen. The second chapter begins the “real book” with You have never been so hungry; you have never been so cold. Both seem overly eager to please, to promise great, dramatic things before you have the chance to put the book down. Benioff even pokes fun at himself; Kolya, the older of the two boys, is discussing a novel that opens with the line In the slaughterhouse where we first kissed, the air still stank from the blood of the lambs. Lev is quick to dismiss this as melodramatic, although it’s no more so than either of Benioff’s opening lines. Perhaps this framing device is simply an extension of that; a difficulty in warming up, in trusting that the story will be enough.

Whatever Benioff’s reasons for writing it, that first chapter is redundant and distracting; but skip it, or forget it, and City of Thieves is a terrific, well-written adventure.