The Bickford Fuse by Andrey Kurkov review – a Soviet Pilgrim’s Progress

An ambitiously philosophical exploration of Russia’s maze-like history from the writer of Death and the Penguin

Towards the end of the second world war, junior seaman Vasily Kharitonov is shipwrecked on Russia’s far eastern coast, with a big barge full of dynamite and safety fuses. For decades he walks thousands of miles across Russia, from the Sea of Japan to Leningrad, carrying one end of a fuse that is still attached to the rusting vessel, with potentially devastating explosive power. This is the fantastical premise of The Bickford Fuse, the latest book by Russophone Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov to be translated into English.

Kurkov won an international following after the English translation of his gloomily comic Death and the Penguin came out in 2001. The story of an obituary writer in Kiev who adopts a zoo penguin called Misha and falls in with the local mafia, it satirised the baffling forces that control our lives. Animals – ants, a wolf, a companionable rat – also follow Kurkov’s characters throughout The Bickford Fuse with the dogged logic of a fable. “Go with the current or you’re done for,” one raft-borne character tells a huge dead fish that tried to swim against the tide.

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