Chris Morgan Jones: The Silent Oligarch. NY: Penguin Press, 2012. 312 pp.
It’s not much of a spoiler to reveal that The Silent Oligarch starts with a murder. Right there in the Introduction, before Chapter One, an investigative journalist named Inessa Kirova is killed, apparently because she was looking too closely into the energy sector in Kazakhstan. Immediately thereafter, her friend Benedict Webster finds himself unceremoniously thrown out of the country. As the police show little interest in the case, he remains frustrated in his search for what will ultimately prove a “vain quest for some distant, flickering justice.” (pg. 257)
Webster’s first opportunity to find justice of any sort comes a decade later, pretty much by accident. He happens to get hired to investigate a Russian oligarch and man of few words, Konstantin Malin. Using techniques of investigative journalism and espionage, he sets out to expose Malin’s corruption and also uncover his reason for wanting Inessa dead. Acting on a tip, he tracks down what seemingly triggered the quiet don’s anger – an article she wrote shortly before her murder. The problem is that even after finding this obscure article and reading it over and over, he still can’t figure out what information in it was so damaging (perhaps because he lacks a guilty conscience). This sets up a recurring pattern in the novel: The investigator gets his hands on a key document which on closer examination turns out to contain nothing incriminating, such that the mystery of motive never gets completely solved. “Some things in Russia were simply never meant to be known.” (pg. 84)
The problem of a financial thriller – one which the author fully aware of – is that the hero, Webster, does not exactly work for the good guys, no matter how defined, but rather for a business rival of the bad guys. What we have here is a knight in shining armor who gets mixed up in a fight among thieves. Moreover our would-be avenger leaves something to be desired when it comes to effectiveness. Bumbling around like Holly Martins in The Third Man, he ends up indirectly responsible for a number of deaths – Inessa’s being merely the first. He doggedly tracks down one information-provider after another, and though they reveal very little, a couple of them are subsequently liquidated anyway. Much to Webster’s surprise and chagrin, he discovers that if certain people simply tell him to leave them alone, that can be enough to make them a target. Just his poking around leads to them falling from dangerous heights or disappearing without a trace. Suffice it to say that while Webster does learn from his mistakes, his learning curve comes at a steep price.
The most important link in the chain leading to Malin is Richard Lock, a Dutch lawyer and front man caught between two worlds. Lock’s agony over whether he should remain with his Russian protector or go over to Webster’s side forms the plot’s central question. And at this point, if not sooner, it becomes evident that our story is based in part on an actual legal case. According to the WSJ, when the Russian head of a company (and former minister of the RF) was convicted of criminal offenses and sentenced to a large fine, he sought to avoid payment by claiming that the real owner of the company was – his Danish lawyer!
Because he has been there himself, Chris Morgan Jones gets almost all the local details right. One reason I like this book so much is that it features places I have lived – London, Moscow (he has an eye for the city’s sometimes tawdry opulence), and towards the end Berlin. His characters make mental observations and associations I find apt: “This part of Berlin was all wide streets and solid apartment blocks. Something about the rhythm of the buildings – the narrowness of the windows, the space between them, the height of the floors – reminded him strongly of Moscow.” (pg. 236) When it comes to housing, East Berlin and Moscow do indeed share many architectural similarities. No doubt this is owing to the circumstance that the post-war reconstruction of Karl-Marx-Allee was carried out by Soviet architects. For me, this makes for a comforting reading experience, a bit like slipping one’s feet back into a favorite pair of shoes.
Though Morgan Jones has as yet created no character comparable to George Smiley – Webster lacks his melancholy wisdom – comparisons to le Carré are not out of line. He writes in a similar taut style, with an eye for authentic detail, familiarity with the milieu, and careful composition. Like the author of Smiley’s People, he also indulges in a certain playfulness when it comes to allusive names. One of the victims here, Gerstman, even sports a name almost identical to one of Karla’s aliases, no doubt coincidentally. Or take Hammer, Webster’s employer and mentor, whose given name is Ike, but who is never explicitly referred to as “Ike Hammer,” thus keeping us from making any conscious association with Mike Hammer. This Hammer runs Ikertu Consulting, which obviously incorporates his first name, Ike. Beyond that, in the final scene this gruff but considerate boss tries to comfort Webster by telling him in effect, “I care too” (Ikertu).
Want more? Hammer sets out to break Lock, or rather he persuades Webster to spin a web to entrap him. While Lock has “Locked up” Malin’s money, Webster wants to “unpick” Malin’s world and “unlock” Gerstman’s motivation. In any case, Lock is a key figure. He imagines the FBI “locking him in a dark room,” while he vainly seeks security by equipping his apartment with three “deadlocks” (hint, nudge, wink). In Chapter Nine, luckless Lock is unable to pick a lock at first, though eventually he does succeed. I could go on, but you get the idea. The point, as I say, is that both Morgan Jones and le Carré love to play with these suggestive associations.
Some of the dialogue is in German with English translation. I spotted only two noteworthy errors. The first is an example of what could perhaps be termed involuntary tmesis, the insertion of one word into the middle of another: The ordinary expression “etwas gesehen” (seen something) gets mashed together into “gesetwasehen.” (pg. 248) The second is less likely the result of poor editing: “we’re leaving” should be “wir gehen,” not “wir verlassen.” (pg. 300 – as a transitive verb, verlassen must have an object)
All in all a very impressive first novel – I look forward to reading the next ones.
The dust jacket of the US edition shows daytime Moscow in the background (you can make out St. Basil’s cathedral on the left). The night scene in the foreground features the Gherkin in London. And are those the twin towers on the right? Nice design by Tal Goretsky.
Published in Great Britain under a different title (An Agent of Deceit), the cover has the Brandenburg Gate in the background.
Quotations from The Silent Oligarch:
- “No crime was ever discovered in Russia unless someone more powerful than you wanted to hurt you…” pg. 57
- “If Russian business was famously opaque, energy was its dark center….” pg. 69
- The goal of Malin and his superiors: “Winning back what Russia lost in 1989.” pg. 73
- “Drizzle fell, and it occurred to him at last that this was how Moscow should feel – uncomfortable, oppressive.” pg. 97
- Former KGB men “were practiced in making decisions about people’s lives without recourse to conscience.” pg 100
- “The history of Moscow nightlife was dotted with extravagantly chic restaurants that had failed because rich, middle-caged Russians didn’t splash out on their middle-aged wives. The incentive for the restaurateur to create a mistresses’ restaurant was therefore great…” pg. 103
- “So much of Moscow felt fortified. The whole city could seem like a castle, the Kremlin the keep, the rest a vast bailey of peasants paying homage.” pg. 127
- “… he still spoke of the Kremlin not as a collection of politicians and administrators but as a fearsome creature that might savage you for the merest slight or simply on a whim.” pg. 175
© Hamilton Beck
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