Untraceable has a name like an eighties pop song (by Alison Moyet or T’Pau?). It’s a novel which connects the bombast of Soviet Russia with the clinical nature of Putin’s Russia highly effectively, tracing the way in which chemical weapons were developed and used as part of a covet armoury. The results of this policy has bee seen in the UK, in those cases we know about, at Salisbury and in the murder of Litvinenko. The maguffin in the book is a lethal potion known as Neophyte, developed by a Soviet scientist who then defected to the West. Now, decades later, two Russian agents are sent to finish him off with a dose of his own medicine. The novel is short but sweeping in scope, incorporating events from the Second World War, the Chechnyan war and the present day. There’s a hint of Sorokin in the author’s occasionally forays into a more lyrical register, a poeticism which adds a garnish to the thriller-esque territory the novel adopts as a narrative mechanism. Will the defector survive or will the hapless agents get to him before he can escape? However, because the novel incorporates so much historical and poetic material, it never really feels like a thriller. It’s more a meditation on the nature of an evil that seeks to create an untraceable poison. What kind of society would require this tool? And what does it say about the connection between Putin’s Russia and Stalin’s that both seek to employ it?
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