Apparently, Jane Austin is off the hook. Having smashed sea monsters into Sense and Sensibility and piled a two-fold heap of zombies onto Pride & Prejudice, Quirk Classics have sunk their eccentric fangs into Leo Tolstoy. But rather than just soup up Anna Karenina with some cybernetics, Ben H. Winters has taken the mash-up genre to the place it was always meant to go. With this novel, Quirk & Co. have most definitely arrived.
Whenever academics with nothing better to do compile lists of “great” novels, Tolstoy is always good for a couple entries, with Anna Karenina often checking in higher than War and Peace (despite the latter being more widely known). Anna has even been called the greatest novel ever written, which seems a bit much to me. There’s plenty to admire in the way Tolstoy weaves together romance and betrayal, often leaving the boundary between the two vague and permeable. That said, I generally find him unmanageably long-winded. Let’s be honest, the man wrote huge books, but when you throw robots into the mix, the result is thoroughly entertaining. Perhaps the best compliment I can pay Ben Winters here is that I can’t imagine reading the book without his alterations.
Please understand, Winters has done more than simply tack on android-themed phrases and scenes. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies did that, with little effect in my opinion. Android Karenina, on the other hand, stands on its own literary merit. This is not Anna Karenina AND Androids; it is a creation all its own. The original novel is present everywhere, its influence is undeniable. At the same time, there is never a question as to what version you’re reading. Winters has taken Tolstoy’s story and molded it, shaped it, into this new thing, replete with its own storyline and characters which are just as important as the source material. The robots (and space monsters!) are fun, sure, but the seamless and respectful way in which Winters weaves them into 19th-century Russia is breathtaking.
One of the most vivid and hated (at least by high-schoolers) scenes in the original novel involves Levin scything row after row of wheat. Tolstoy is meticulous in his writing here, elevating verisimilitude to an obsessive level. The way in which Winters transforms this scene may be the best encapsulation of just why this novel works. In this new world, robots are employed in every level of society, up to and including companionship for the rich. They are powered by a mineral called groznium, a mine of which Levin owns and decides to work in one day, alongside his Pitpots.
“How odd, thought Levin, to think that in centuries past this land was intact, unscarred by tunnels and mines, covered instead by fields of gently swaying wheat. Before groznium was discovered, in the ancient days of the Tsar, before there were robots or even the idea of robots, all this was cropland, and where now was heard the clang of the axe and the whir of the Extractor was heard the whisper of the scythe, the tromp of peasant boots on grass, the endless mowing of rows. And all that work, that grueling and backbreaking labor, performed not by tireless machines, but by human beings. This work that he did today as a sort of lark, to rid his irritable soul of excess energy, had in those days been the daily toil of the Russian people in their thousands and millions.”
On the one hand, this passage is powerfully metaphysical. In Levin’s thoughts about Russia’s agrarian past, the reader is reminded about the story’s literary past. This is a memento of the wheat-mowing scene and an acknowledgement by the author of what he is replacing. Moreover, the new scene not only alters the old, but it does so in a way perfectly consistent with the new story. As a groznium pit owner, Levin is a vital part of his society and his trip to the mine allows the reader to see that life in greater detail. When you get right down to it, that is much the same as what Tolstoy accomplished with his farm. Likewise the sense of satisfaction Levin finds in physical labor is the same in both novels, but now it introduces a new concept as well: the conflict between human independence and our reliance on technology. Winters later returns to the contrasting images of pit mine and wheat field as a means of highlighting the conflict, a technique he employs with all the subtlety of Tolstoy’s train imagery in Anna.
It would have been enough for Winters to modify and emulate the Russian master’s style, turning those skills to pure entertainment. Throughout the novel, however, he uses this modified Victorian Russia to level a delicate criticism of modern society. When a well-to-do Russian child comes of age, they are awarded their own companion robot, a Class III. These androids act as counselors, guides and protectors. They play music, display communications, and even shine skin-tone-appropriate lighting when needed. Class II’s fulfill simpler functions such as service (butlers, waiters) and transportation, while Class I’s are things like smart light bulbs and toys. The Russians have become completely reliant on bots of all shapes and sizes, despite the fact that similar technology is being used in terrorist attacks. As the story progresses, the people lose the use of this technology and founder amidst a new old-world. I found the irony hard to ignore, especially as people blindly follow their GPS systems into traffic
The style and mastery of Android Karenina is everything I hoped for on first hearing about Quirk Classics. The book is Anna Karenina, but it’s not. An acknowledged classic has been given a fresh coat of paint that does more than just cover over the cracks of 130 years. It modernizes, excites, and entertains without sacrificing that which made Tolstoy a literary hero.
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