I haven’t read all of Boris Akunin’s work, but I’ve read a fairly substantial part of it—enough to say that the series about Erast Fandorin is probably the most significant thing the author has come up with so far.
And so, when the hero’s life path started nearing its end, true fans were very saddened. The thing is, in my view the later books in the series fell far short of the first ten. Still, they were bought and read as soon as they came out. And when it seemed like Erast Petrovich was finished once and for all, first there was Just Masa, telling the story of his constant companion, and then suddenly The Pit came out, bringing back the wonderful detective himself.
The narrative throws us into a time when Fandorin is still a long way from death, but in Russia he’s already persona non grata, so he makes his living investigating cases in Europe. For example, together with Sherlock Holmes he fights Arsène Lupin. Yes, that story appeared earlier in the collection Jade Rosary Beads, and now the author takes us back to the very end of that investigation to tell us what happened next to our heroes.
It’s basically impossible to talk about this book without spoilers, so if you haven’t read it yet, it’s better to skip this.
Because the plot is built around a fight against yet another secret order. And I can’t help agreeing with a lot of reviewers that the sense of deja vu compared to the very first novel in the series, Azazel, shows through in everything. Another secret organization, again they’re looking for talented children. The only difference is that here they need different talents. And the scale of the order’s ambitions is smaller, and there’s even less of a detective line.
Plus this is far from the first book where Boris Akunin writes about other members of the Fandorin family, but even here you can feel the self-repetition (Fandorin has already crossed paths with descendants of his line in more than one book).
According to the author, the secret order itself was modeled on the Assassins’ clan, but to me it felt like his love for Japan is closer to the mark here: you can’t help noticing a certain resemblance to Japanese clans of spies. The Japanese, too, had a division between the male shinobi school and the female kunoichi clans—doing broadly similar work, but by different methods, given the differences between men and women. In the book, that’s shown precisely through the example of the boy fighters and the girl students from Paradise.
But what disappointed me most was that the novel The Pit can’t really be called a book about Fandorin. He’s barely in it—apparently that’s why the author himself seems to think of it more as Just Masa 2. For most of the time, Fandorin is basically a prop. This is much more about Masa.
On top of that, the book has a lot of musings about good and evil, the West and the East. And at some point those musings start to outweigh the detective-adventure side of things, which is why even the ending turns out to be a dud. They kept building and building the tension, the enemy genius is practically some otherworldly superhuman—and then, bam, it’s over. In theory it works; in practice it’s a disappointment.
And all the old ingredients seem to be there: good prose, the same characters—but… the taste just isn’t the same anymore. It was with this book that I felt like it’s already time to put this whole thing to rest for good. But if something else about Masa or Fandorin still comes out, I’ll buy it and read it anyway. Because come on—it’s Fandorin!
My rating: 3.5/5
