The Betrayal - Helen Dunmore

The Betrayal is one of the books long listed for this years Man Booker Prize and is the follow up book to The Siege which I read a couple of weeks ago. It has been said that you can read the books out of order or one without the other but I don't think it is only my tendency to obsessive reading patterns that has me saying you should read The Siege first and then The Betrayal - I think they compliment each other so well and I think you would be disappointed if you read them in the other order (at least I know I would have been). Just to let you know that the following review may give away some plot details which you may prefer not to know if you haven't read the books as yet but are planning to.

The Betrayal starts a little while after the end of The Siege in 1952 - the siege of Leningrad is over and families are trying to rebuild their lives in the midst of the terrors and uncertainties of the Stalin regime.

The Betrayal again focuses on the characters of Anna and Andrei who have now married and are together taking care of Anna's 16 year old brother, Kolya. Andrei is working as a doctor in a local hospital and it is in this role that he comes across a young boy with a possibly serious medical condition - nothing really out of the ordinary except for the fact that this boy is the son of one of the highest ranking members of the secret police - a man who is known and feared.

It did take me a lot longer to become engaged with this book than I did with The Siege - I think the main reason for this is that The Siege really focused on Anna's telling of her story whereas The Betrayal begins by focusing a lot more on Andrei's story and experiences being told more from his point of view. There was nothing wrong with this - in fact this is where the focus of this particular story needed to be - I was just expecting more from Anna to begin with.

Once I became involved in the story though I was hooked - again it is a beautifully written and expressed story. My only critique would have to be about the final short chapter of the book - in my view it wasn't needed and I wish the story had ended at the end of the second last chapter instead.

But this is really only a minor complaint - this book and the stories of the characters held my interest and has me now looking for more - not sure that this will be forthcoming??

The Siege - Helen Dunmore

I was led to reading The Siege after the Longlist for the 2010 Man Booker Prize was announced and the follow up book to The Siege, The Betrayal, was nominated.

I am certainly not intending to read all of the books on the Longlist although I do find prize lists really handy in helping to discover new reads that otherwise would have remained unread. The Betrayal caught my eye as a book I would be interested in as World War 2 and the period just before and after it has always been a time in history I have been strongly interested in. I'm not sure why really, I did study that period at school and my dad has always been interested in it too so maybe that is enough to continue to spark my interest. Anyway, me being the obsessive person that I am - I couldn't read The Betrayal knowing that there was a prequel out there - it had to be read first.

Which leads to The Siege - one of the most amazing and incredibly well written novels I have ever read - let alone one that focuses on this time in history.

The Siege covers the period in Leningrad just before and during the German siege of the city when so many people died from starvation and disease. The book takes a broad focus on the city at times but the main way in which the story is told is through the eyes of one family who are struggling to survive physically and psychologically through this period.

Anna is a young woman caring for her younger brother, father and her father's lover as well as starting a new and tentative relationship with a doctor, Andrei, and we follow her as she attempts to find items of food on the ever decreasing rations available as well as heating their apartment and fighting of sickness during the cruel Leningrad winter - it is quite literally a story of survival.

The book is stark and brutal - the descriptions of the hunger and struggles feel so real and frightening and yet they are told simply with little drama or showiness;

The streets are almost empty. She passes the hump of a body frozen into a doorway, covered with drifted snow. It looks like a bag of rubbish, but Anna knows it's a body because she saw it before the snow hid it. It's an old woman. Maybe she stopped to rest on the way back from fetching her ration. Anna doesn't like going past the park anymore. There are people sitting on benches, swathed in snow, planted like bulbs to wait for spring. They stay there day after day. No one comes to take them away.

The book was honest and tough - it is telling a story of what must have been an unbelievably hard time to live through and survive and I appreciated that the author did not try to sugar coat the story in anyway - I felt so connected to Anna and I was hanging in there with her until the very end. I have now started The Betrayal - despite the tragedy and darkness these are such compelling books to read.