Marina & Sergey Dyachenko's ASSASSIN OF REALITY (Tr Julia Metov Hersey, Narr Jessica Bell)

There is a kind of deeply pessimistic magical thinking that occurs to some people when they find themselves on the verge of falling in love (or, really, already having so fallen but not ready to admit it). We say to ourselves something like, oh no now God or the universe or fate or my enemies have another hostage for my good behavior. They know they can't actually hurt me directly because I'm hopeless already, but they can hurt this person that I might love, and hurt me that way. 

Marina & Sergey Dyachenko's Vita Nostra books are all about exploring what this means when it's literally true. Last novel, the hostages were heroine Sasha Samokhina's mother and Mum's new husband and baby. If Sasha didn't study hard at the weird school she'd been coerced into attending, terrible things would happen to her family. Examples were made when she tried to test this, even as she (was told that she) gave up her humanity in order to become something entirely else; her studies were preparing her to wield incredible power, and so there had to be incredible consequences if she showed signs of misusing it.

At the first novel's end, when she took the all important third year Placement Exam at the Torpa Institute of Special Technologies, Sasha, already acknowledged as the school's finest current student and poised to become a uniquely powerful Imperative Verb in the Great Speech, manifested as something even more alarming and unexpected than that. An Imperative Verb could profoundly influence other Parts of Speech (as she learned when she understood that her then-boyfriend, a Subjunctive Verb, would never really have freedom or free will while they were together), but the Password she turned out actually to be is more powerful yet. Too powerful. There must be consequences.

This second novel, Assassin of Reality, starts off with an imposition of some of those consequences, conducted in such a way as to free her original hostages for her good behavior from their roles, and introduce a new one: an attractive airline pilot, Jaroslav, who grew up in the town of Torpa and flies a regular route in and out of its municipal airport. They are immediately and ferociously attracted to one another, but it all feels rather forced and Sasha senses the hand of her terrifying advisor, Farit Kozhennikov in it all. 

It is, of course, only one of her problems. 

As she begins her fourth year at the Torpa Institute of Special Technologies, Sasha is, oddly, warmly welcomed back by her classmates, even those who previously resented her, but regarded with outright hostility by their most important teacher: their frighteningly altered former gym teacher. This teacher, Dima, whom everyone had been led to regard as a gentle himbo, is in fact every bit as scary as Farit -- maybe even more so, as he shifts between his himbo and his steely-eyed bastard personas moment to moment and without warning. And he teaches the most difficult and dangerous class yet, in which students must examine and manipulate diagrams that can manipulate them back, for the worse. 

It is Dima who declares Sasha an "Assassin of Reality" but won't explain why, and flatly refuses to teach her. Another instructor at the school with whom she has a better relationship tries to help her make up for this severe handicap, but with limited results -- and strangely joins her advisor Farit in encouraging her to let a love affair with Jaroslav happen! She needs, they tell her, a way to recharge herself, get away from it all, and, most importantly, a source of fear to balance out the spells of omnipotence that have led Sasha to believe, in her grander moments, that she can fix everything that's wrong with the world, even the fact that people have to die.

Speaking of dying, Farit has shown up with a new way of using Jaroslav to compel Sasha's good behavior, a way that doesn't harm a hair on Jaroslav's head, and is even crueler than casually reminding her that any airplane can crash. And it's as subtle as when the Tenth Doctor asks Harriet Jones' aide-de-camp if Harriet maybe looks "a bit tired." And as devastating.

Some readers have complained that Assassin of Reality isn't as interesting as Vita Nostra, which was, after all, intended as a stand-alone, but I think it's every bit as interesting, just differently so. Vita Nostra was first and foremost a coming-of-age, structured by Sasha's progress through her first three years at Torpa; Assassin of Reality, while still taking place almost entirely at the school, has far murkier territory to explore: adulthood, with its new responsibilities, burdens, freedoms and fears. Sasha hasn't graduated yet but the Placement Exam she didn't really pass so much as obviate at the end of Vita Nostra was still very much a rite of passage (which not everybody survived), and her life after it is very, very different.

Part of this is because we finally find out what happens to Torpa students after they pass the Placement Exam; first- and second-year students are simply told that third years move on to study "elsewhere" after Placement, but it turns out it's really "elsewhen" -- they are transported as a group 15 years into the future, effectively cutting them off completely from their families and former lives in general (with the exception of poor Kostya, Sasha's first friend at the school, who has the dubious honor of being the son of their terrifying advisor, Farit)! That this kind of means that maybe Jaroslav was just a kid when Sasha endured her first three years at Torpa is never really explored but it's hard not to think about anyway.

Moreover, this book masterfully draws out a thread of ambiguity, if possibility that has been there in this story all along. Except for Sasha's winged flights over Torpa and her deeply weird experiences of profoundly altered perspective, we haven't seen much that is overtly magical or supernatural. Even the supposed time travel could really just have been accomplished by updating the decor of the Institute and adding some newer technology.* 

There is always the possibility that Farit has simply manipulated Sasha and her classmates, threatened them, confused them, spirited them away from their loved ones, shut them in with a bunch of equally vulnerable young people and made them work to exhaustion and beyond at stuff that makes no sense. They get little sleep, are forbidden most outlets for normal youthful energy, and become convinced that their teachers and Farit have godlike power over them. What does that all sound like?

It sounds kind of like a cult, to me. Sasha wouldn't be the first young woman to become convinced, through a series of events and circumstances and, yes, abuse,  engineered to be as bizarre as possible, that she's had a few supernatural experiences. Possibly with the help of psychedelics in the tea everybody is always sipping?

"It's too much to just give up, isn't it?" Sasha was dizzy, as if Farit's voice was alcohol of the highest proof, or a warm poison flooding her ears. 

And just when Jaroslav seems poised to become a source of actual strength for Sasha, when he and his father seem about to become a new family to which she might gladly belong (she even starts to consider having a child), Farit, with just the barest suggestion, turns her against her new love. And it never occurs to her that Farit might have simply lied to her. By the time he poisons her love with a few words, she is convinced of only two possibilities: that Jaroslav and his father have been lying all along, or that while they might have been real and honest and sincere before, Farit has such power over time and reality that he has reached back in the history of their lives to make his whispered slanders into the truth. But the simplest and most likely possibility is not the correct one in this mixed up world of Sasha's. 

This is, of course, the least interesting way to understand what's been going on in these books and I don't necessarily espouse it. I do, however, admire the skill and care that went into constructing the world of these novels, such that the mundane interpretation is even possible. I plan to go back and read these first two books again before I tackle the third, Migrant which, I'm told, has already been translated by Ms. Hersey, but does not yet seem to have a publication date in English. I have, however, been working very hard on my Russian vocabulary, and an ebook of the original Russian edition was very inexpensive so maybe... maybe I'll jump the gun. 

Of course, I said that about the third of Rodrigo Fresán's Tres Partes, which was published in English before I was even halfway through the Spanish edition, so pfft. I will note, though, that my Russian is way better than my Spanish. 

Either way, I'm excited for Volume Three, even though this second book had a very satisfactory ending on its own. 

*Just because they were using physical books, pencils, paper and blackboards in Vita nostra didn't necessarily mean that plasma touchscreens, smart phones and computers didn't exist, after all, just that the school didn't provide them. This could be for reasons of budget, aesthetics or the behind-the-times requirements of pedagogy.