Winner of the 2022 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize, Michelle Butler Hallett’s novel Constant Nobody, expertly transcends all of the possible genres it might have been pigeonholed into – historical fiction, spy thriller, love story – by weaving all these elements to produce a compelling investigation of tenderness and survival under the microscope of political oppression.
We first meet our protagonists – polyglot British intelligence agent Temerity West and NKVD police agent Konstantin Nikto (a name which translates into Constant Nobody) – in an International Red Aid clinic during the Spanish Civil War. He is posing as a journalist and she as a nurse administering sulpha to him for gonorrhea. — Swallow each and every one or your cock will fall off. These first words that she utters to him, with their blunt intimacy, serve as a kind of sly foreshadowing of their relationship to come. They encounter each other later in Moscow during Stalin’s rule, where, as an undercover agent, she teaches languages to children of the Comintern, and he has resumed his duties in the secret police. Through a complicated series of events, she finds herself in his flat – both rescued and imprisoned – along with Dr. Efim Scherba, who has been assigned to live with Kostya in order to treat his wounded shoulder with morphine. This crowded situation is nothing less than a virulent petri dish of suspicion, paranoia, vulnerability, and desire.
“… a page-turner that both stirs the reader’s intellect while burrowing into the darkest recesses of their emotions.”
Michelle Butler Hallett brings all her formidable talents for impeccable research and an evocative and economic writing style to weave a page-turner that both stirs the reader’s intellect while burrowing into the darkest recesses of their emotions. She adds great imagination to her storytelling by employing both Russian fairy tales and Greek mythology as meeting points for Temerity and Kostya, who come from wildly different backgrounds, she from the British upper crust and he as an impoverished orphan during the revolution. The author also commands a seemingly effortless mastery over her material by evoking all of the senses in the smallest of details. I was personally tickled (as someone from a Russian-Jewish background) by her sense of humour when Kostya displays a bad temper and is asked: Who pissed in your kasha this morning? I laughed out loud at that for a long time. Even if the political state of the world weren’t what it is today, Constant Nobody would still be considered a vital addition from Canada to the sphere of international literature. But seeing where we are and how perilously close we are to it, can we afford, as Canadians, not to read such an astute and all-encompassing work of art as Constant Nobody?
About the Author
Michelle Butler Hallett, she/her, is a history nerd and disabled person who writes fiction about violence, evil, love, and grace. The Toronto Star describes her work as “perfectly paced and gracefully wrought,” while Quill and Quire calls it “complex, lyrical, and with a profound sense of a world long passed.” Her short stories are widely anthologized in Hard Ol’ Spot, The Vagrant Revue of New Fiction, Everything Is So Political, Running the Whale’s Back, and Best American Mystery Stories, and her essay “You’re Not ‘Disabled’ Disabled” appears in Land of Many Shores. Her most recent novel, This Marlowe, was longlisted for the ReLit Award and the Dublin International Literary Award. Her first novel, Double-blind, was shortlisted for the Sunburst Award.
Butler Hallett lives in St. John’s. Constant Nobody is her fifth novel.
About the Reviewer
Steven Mayoff is a novelist, poet, and lyricist living on PEI. His website is www.stevenmayoff.ca
Book Details
Publisher : Goose Lane Editions
Publication date : March 2 2021
Language : English
Print length : 440 pages
ISBN-10 : 1773101579
ISBN-13 : 978-1773101576