The Secret History of Moscow, by Ekaterina Sedia
Back in 2006 I recommended Sergei Lukyanenko's translated urban fantasy Night Watch. Since then I've read its sequels (Day Watch and Twilight Watch) and found a great deal to like in them. But there was always one thing that bothered me about the series: although the mundane elements felt very pleasingly grounded in their Moscow setting, so that you couldn't just transplant the story to New York without noticing, the supernatural material felt very generic. Sure, the Twilight and all that went with it was original, but when you get down to it, the story is still about magicians, vampires, and shape-shifters -- very familiar stuff. Russia has a wealth of awesome folklore and mythology; where was it?
In Ekaterina Sedia's book, apparently. The Secret History of Moscow likewise presents you with a believably Russian setting, but it doesn't stop with the mundane city; when the characters pass underground, they find all the forgotten history and mythology of Russia waiting for them there. From ancient notions like Father Frost to the more modern Decembrist's Wife, the hidden world is chock-full of native beings and ideas. Sedia doesn't try to pretend they're utterly unique -- she, via her characters, recognizes the connections they bear to other cultures -- but she makes underground Moscow the repository for everything the city above has cast aside and forgotten.
It's a slender novel, all things considered, and with three major viewpoint characters it feels a bit fragmented at times. But that fits in with the kind of story Sedia's telling. Moscow, at least in this novel with these characters, comes across as a city that encourages alienation and fragmentation. If I have a complaint, it's that I didn't feel I had enough time with the characters to fully invest in them, and also that it turned me off the city. While I certainly don't need an idealized view that whitewashes over the problems the real place has -- that way lies exoticism -- I adore stories that give me the warts and still make me love the place anyway. (Come to think of it, Lukyanenko also painted a pretty grim Moscow. Given the debates the characters in Sedia's book had about how few people get counted as "real" Muscovites, I find myself wondering if anybody who lives there likes it. There must be -- for all I know, Lukyanenko and/or Sedia love it plenty -- but so far that hasn't translated to me as a reader.)
But enough about Moscow above; it's the world below I loved. I faintly recognized about half of the creatures down there; Sedia does a good job of providing sufficient context for the rest, and Father Frost's rants about people invading in the winter are damn funny. So is the interaction that gets repeated practically every time somebody runs into Koschei the Deathless: "I know where your death is!" "Yeah, you and everybody else. Shut up." The old things are down there, but that doesn't mean they're stuck in the past.
Perhaps the best thing I can say about this novel is that it makes me want to write a paper about cities-beneath-cities, comparing this to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and various other books that use the same trope. Sedia's Secret History feels like it connects both vertically and horizontally, to the surface world of modern Moscow and the hidden realms elsewhere in the world. I don't have the theoretical background to analyze that, but I can live with happy delusions of organizing a crossover anthology full of stories where all those subterranean cities run into each other.