REVIEW OF RED PLENTY Francis Spufford

 BY TOM WELLS

In the opening line of Red Plenty, Francis Spufford notes that the book is neither a novel nor a history but a fairytale, specifically a Russian fairytale.  I admit that my limited knowledge of fairy tales runs to those Disney has made into cartoons, but they seem to be of two types: (1) they lived happily ever after; and (2) don’t go into the woods. I don’t remember the one about the insular community that vainly thought it could create a world-beating economy through rigid state planning and enforced control of travel, creativity and critical thinking.  

Genre definition aside, Francis Spufford has succeeded in creating an exhaustively researched, superbly written historical fiction about the failed effort to escape the shackles of Tsarist enslavement and Stalinist paranoia to give its citizenry a standard of living that would make it the envy of Muncie and Peoria. Where he has not succeeded is in creating what a fairytale must surely have: archetypal characters you root for, fear for or fear.  

As a result, this is a novel more admirable than digestible. Open to just about any page, and you will find at least one fragment, sentence or paragraph that makes you wish you could write like that. Take page 190 (which I just randomly flipped to), for instance: 

“The supply system had moronically misclassified (the place)…as a college town, in need of the calorific intake required to lift pencils and wipe blackboards; but there were forty thousand people living and working in the industrial zone out by the tracks now, and between the students and the loco workers, a locust would have been hard put to find a spare crumb.”  

Or the description of one anxious toady on facing page 191 as “sweating with desperate amiability.”  

Verbal highlights aside, what most undermines the author’s genre claim is that the reader knows there is no fairytale ending to the Soviet experiment. No happily-ever-after or even axe-man-eviscerating-wolf. Just a slow creep toward another form of suppressive plutocracy.  

***½