The People’s Act of Love James Meek Canongate, 391pp, £12.99 ISBN 1841956546

I read this novel, set in Siberia, on a trip to Moscow on Russian Booker business (I chair the committee), and could not help wondering what, were it to be translated, Russian readers would make of it. I suspect they would be impressed, and with good reason. It is hard to think of anything more worthy of this year’s British Booker.

Will Meek inherit the literary earth? Given the head of steam behind Ian McEwan’s cosily parochial Saturday, probably not. Meek ventures further than the moist recesses of the north London conscience. The time is the Russian civil war of 1919. The place is a small town and outpost of the Skopzi,

a religious sect dating back to the 18th century whose members believe that all that is needed for men to become angels is voluntary castration. Quartered in the town is a forgotten detachment of the pro-White Czechoslovak interventionist forces. Meanwhile, the Reds are closing in.

The historical perspectives are vast, but Meek’s characters more than fill the stage. Balashov, leader of the sect, is a tsarist hussar who, traumatised by war, took the cut. His wife, understandably upset, forswears God and becomes a nymphomaniac. Matula, leader of the Czech garrison, is a sadist. Samarin, the anarchist anti-hero, is another - though more plausible - monster.

Revolution, civil war, cannibalism, the abdication of God, the justification of terrorism, manic religion. Big ideas are not natural English territory, and in the wrong hands this novel could have been a didactic disaster. Yet Meek pulls it off. One key to his success is that his novel has

a compelling plot full of clever twists; if Dostoevsky, who wrote a good deal of his work for periodicals, in snatches, can shove in an unashamed cliffhanger at a chapter’s end, so can Meek.

Another is language. Having lived in Russia for a decade (he was a Guardian correspondent in Moscow), Meek has

a good ear for that peculiarly ethereal tone that can inflect ordinary Russian speech, so that grand notions can be expressed in unpretentious, sometimes earthy language. He also undersands the Russian equivalent of the acte gratuit, of which his novel contains many. In other cultures, it would be absurd to suggest that people could ever behave in the tragico-philosophical way they do here. But Russians, and Russian history, are like that, and it is a huge achievement to convey the ideas and events Meek does without an alienating sense of weirdness.

The evocation of Siberia is both beautiful and a metaphor for a human waste-land. The sense of despair is leavened

by remnants of decency, notably in the Jewish Czech officer Mutz, who falls for Balashov’s frustrated wife (though theirs is a sober, non-romantic affair, as Meek wisely avoids the temptation to throw

in a cheap, all-redeeming love). Spirited dialogue and touches of humour, mainly from the Czech conscripts and reminiscent of Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk (Hasek actually served in the Czech intervention in Russia), also lighten the sense of unrelieved depravity.

It is hard to discuss the conclusion of the novel without sabotaging the skilfully contrived MacGuffin. My only advice to the reader would be to enjoy the story, marvel at the book’s unshowy intelligence, unforced imagination and unobtrusive research, and resist the temptation to read into it more than there is, or think too hard about the characters or their symbolism. Great themes underpin the action, but in postmodern times an apparatus of profundity does not guarantee profundity itself. The title of the book is an example. The "act of love" favoured by Samarin is the destruction of everything as an indispensable prelude to - well, the usual. Building a bright future on a pile of bones (or in the case of the Skopzi, balls) is not a new thought. Essentially we are in the realms of good old-fashioned eschatology, and the novel can be read as a dramatisation in Russian revolutionary guise, complete with lunatic religious sect, of Norman Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium.

The best description of Russia came from Louis-Ferdinand Céline after a visit to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Une catastrophe qui végète - a vegetating catastrophe - was his unimprovable conclusion. That is exactly the atmosphere Meek’s novel conjures up - of permanently impending menace. But here, too, lies the book’s problem. The Reds, bearers of "The Idea" whose dawn is at hand as the White forces crumble, come across as a purifying force that will cleanse the country of tsarist oppression, obscurantism and religious fanaticism. (It is hard not to wince pre-emptively at the over-the-top casting for the film of the book that will certainly come: the young Red leader will be blessed with noble, square-jawed features and a magnanimous temperament.)

The trouble is that we cannot un-know what we know about the revolution’s aftermath. The Skopzi were crazy but, by definition, non-violent folk. Killing some 20 million people by starvation, the Gulag, purges, torture and execution in the name of "The Idea" was another form of insanity, this time "scientific". This excellent novel is only the beginning of a longer and yet more appalling story. Meek should not vegetate on his success. A catastrophic sequel is in order.

George Walden’s most recent book is Who’s a Dandy? (Gibson Square)

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