It was a sad day in 2019 when scientists finally scotched the urban myth that London’s many wild parakeets are descended from a pair of pet birds released by Jimi Hendrix in his Carnaby Street days. Luckily, in his newly translated novel, the Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov rides to the rescue with some Hendrix lore of his own invention. According to the book, which has been longlisted for the International Booker prize, the guitar hero’s right hand was smuggled into the USSR with the connivance of the KGB and buried in a corner of Lychakiv cemetery in Lviv, western Ukraine. As a consequence, every year, on 18 September, the anniversary of Hendrix’s death, ageing fans from across the former Soviet Union gather at the cemetery to pay tribute.
This conceit gives Kurkov an excuse to remind us about the existence of an almost forgotten aspect of Soviet subculture: its hippies. Sticking it to the man was a much more perilous activity in Brezhnev’s USSR than it was in Haight-Ashbury.
As the novel opens, in September 2011, the depleted bunch of hippies are joined by an unexpected guest: Captain Ryabtsev, the former KGB officer who kept tabs on them in Soviet times. It turns out that Ryabtsev is a Hendrix fan, too. This is a great setup. There is something potentially brilliant in the relationship between the ageing hippy Alik and the KGB man Ryabtsev, who is more in sympathy with those he was paid to spy on than with the organisation he served.
I would have happily settled for an entire novel about these two, but the author has something different in mind. The cast of characters expands. We’re introduced to another plot strand: minicab driver Taras, who specialises in jolting excursions through Lviv’s cobbled streets to help foreign clients pass their kidney stones. Taras is falling for Darka, a woman in the bureau de change he frequents. And Darka happens to be allergic to the money she’s compelled to handle.
Meanwhile, it turns out that the former KGB man Ryabtsev is troubled by some bizarre developments that are affecting all the characters in the novel: the pervasive smell of seawater and the presence of aggressive seagulls in landlocked Lviv suggest that the prehistoric Carpathian sea is going to emerge from under the ground and inundate present-day Ukraine. Ryabtsev’s fears are matched by Taras’s ominous dreams. Taras’s friend Oksana takes him to a Laboratory of Paranormal Occurrences to investigate further.
Will the sea rise? Will Taras and Darka find love? Will Alik and Captain Ryabtsev crack the mystery of the paranormal occurrences? And who is the strange sailor who appears to have escaped from a novel by a man called Yurko Vynnychuk? The reader finds that despite the promise of the setup, we’ve moved away from The Lives of Others and closer to Scooby-Doo.
Kurkov’s laconic masterpiece Death and the Penguin worked by mining an absurd situation for pathos and balancing it with darkness. Whimsy was a barely noticeable flavour in a cocktail of other ingredients. I confess I didn’t have so much appetite for Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv. It’s partly a question of timing: with Ukraine facing a threat so much worse than inundation by a possibly allegorical sea, the world of the novel feels cute and its jeopardy abstract.
Even the prose is looser than the stripped-down writing of Death and the Penguin. And while Reuben Woolley does an otherwise fine job with the translating, there’s a grating tendency to use the non-standard British English form “he was sat”, “they were stood” instead of “he was sitting”, “they were standing”. It’s in the acknowledgments that we find the biggest clues to Kurkov’s motives for writing the book. There, he thanks three real-life Lvivites for allowing him to use them as characters. It turns out that Alik, Oksana and Yurko share the names and biographies of real people: a hippy called Alik Olisevych, an actor and social activist called Oksana Prokhorets and the writer Yurko (or more formally, Yuri) Vynnychuk.
The real Alik Olisevych is in fact a legend of Soviet counterculture. Born in 1958 and raised in a Soviet school for troubled teens, he reported for military service barefoot and wearing facepaint. It meant he beat the draft but was sent to a psychiatric hospital instead. Olisevych’s life would make an extraordinary novel, possibly by Kurkov himself – One Flew Over the Penguin’s Nest? – but it’s not this one, whose true purpose, like one of those commissioned murals in a town centre, is to depict and celebrate the geography, culture, spirit and residents of a city.
Much has changed since Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv was first published in Russian in 2012. At that moment, Ukraine seemed fated to be tugged indefinitely but largely peacefully between Russia and Europe. This gentle book could be interpreted, then, as a healing gesture. Ukraine’s most successful Russian-language author was writing a love letter to Lviv, Ukraine’s linguistic and cultural capital, and joining the two halves of the nation’s divided identity. Today, things have got to the stage where Kurkov has written that he’s “been made to feel ashamed many times of my Russian origin, of the fact that my native language is Russian”. But there is nothing as wrenching as that admission in this novel, which ultimately feels like a charming but slight addition to the author’s oeuvre.
• Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv by Andrey Kurkov (translated by Reuben Woolley) is published by MacLehose (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
