Kolymsky Heights

"I absolutely love this. It’s a very, very skilful thriller, and very innovative. Lionel Davidson came up with this extremely unusual hero, a Canadian Indian from one of the tribes in British Columbia. The character is given great linguistic abilities and the looks that are typical of the Arctic peoples. And the whole plot revolves around getting him into this incredibly secret base in a very, very closed and remote part of Siberia, to discover a great secret. As it happens, it’s a place I’ve been to, not the base, which is fictional, but the town and region of Cherskii. What I love about this thriller is that the author is just wonderfully sympathetic to the Arctic peoples, who get a slightly rough press sometimes. There is the assumption among many that you’ve got the eskimos living in igloos up in the Arctic, and that’s about it. What this book does is delve into the richness of the different cultures, into the diversity of the different peoples there, their rivalries, and where they feel united. It’s all in the context of the racism of the Russians, who never liked or seem to have respected the people of the Arctic, or even the Arctic itself, except as something to exploit. And it’s a theme that rings very true. Particularly under the Soviet Union, the different peoples of the Arctic were collectivised and there was industrialisation of the crudest kind, exploitation of minerals, and ghastly tales of the gulags. This is all up in this region that’s now going through extraordinary change with the melt opening up great competition for resources, for new shipping routes and for control. The Russians planting a Russian flag on the sea bed at the North Pole was really a signal of intent, that they see the Arctic as their backyard. The book was written long before that event happened, which was only three years ago. But it’s all part of the context there. And I just think it’s a cracking story. I’ve reread it a number of times. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Yes, he is this great, counter-intuitive character. He’s absolutely anti-establishment and loathes the CIA, but he’s quite intrigued by this mission that’s come up and he realises he’s the only person who can do it. And it’s such a clever way to get into the Arctic peoples, to have someone who is not only incredibly sympathetic to them, but looks like them. Everyone I know who’s read it just loves the guy. He’s difficult and unusual and lovable."

"This was first published in 1994. Davidson wrote it right at the end of his career. It’s his last novel. It was then republished in 2015 when lots of people, including me, discovered it. I love it. It is probably the trashiest book on this list, but I make no apologies for that. It’s just so wonderful and weird and brilliant. It is so exciting and beautifully written, beautiful at the level of the sentence. It’s just an amazing novel. The hero is Johnny Porter, who is an indigenous Canadian linguist, anthropologist and survival expert. In some ways, it’s a novel about the peoples of the North. Porter is First Nations Canadian, but he is able to pass as Siberian. He also pretends to be Japanese as he works his way around the world. [SPOILER ALERT] It’s about an attempt to unearth what’s going on at a research station deep in the wilds of Siberia. It’s a totally absurd MacGuffin, but you accept it. There’s so much tradecraft and intricacy to how Porter manages to navigate, firstly, the infiltration and then the exfiltration. The ending is just amazing. I just can’t believe it hasn’t been made into a film. It’s just so cinematic. There is a final, very Bond-like moment on the ice in the far east of Russia. Philip Pullman has showered this book with praise (as have many others), calling it the greatest thriller he’d ever read. I totally concur. It’s so exciting. They just aren’t. In Kolymsky Heights , it’s as if something has dropped away, and he’s just having fun. There’s so much research, and he knows so much. The landscapes are so beautifully rendered. Both in Siberia and the northwest of Canada it’s just magically done. I was blown away by it."

"They’re the five most interesting examples. The first one I’d like to discuss is Kolymsky Heights because it spans the late 1980s and the early 1990s. It’s a crossover novel: Lionel Davidson was writing it before the collapse of the Soviet Union , but it was published shortly afterwards. In many ways, it’s a throwback, an old-fashioned Cold War novel. But it had great success when it was first published in the mid-1990s and then had a reboot here in the UK about five years ago and sold like hotcakes, largely thanks to Waterstones getting behind it. It’s a fabulous book, very detailed, very strange. It’s got a slightly ludicrous plot about a secret scientific facility in Russia and a very unusual hero: an Indigenous Canadian. It’s fantastically well written and the last third of the novel, the exfiltration out of Siberia across the Bering Strait into Alaska, is breathtaking. Like Deighton and le Carré, Davidson came of age at the height of the Cold War . His first book was The Night of Wenceslas , the story of a young man who goes to Prague and becomes embroiled in the secret world. That’s a classic East versus West thriller. I don’t think he was ever in the intelligence services but probably, like me, he had access to people who were. Yes, that’s the trick. You believe in it, even though the idea of a secret Soviet factory that’s doing research on strange monkeys—I can’t quite remember—is so fantastical. It’s almost like something out of science fiction, and you keep turning the pages. The choice of protagonist is also unusual. Apart from anything else, it’s an amazing feat of imagination."