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Zugzwang: A Novel

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As Ronan Bennett's "Zugzwang" opens, two assailants savagely slaughter a liberal newspaper editor named Gulko. The setting is St. Petersburg in 1914, a tumultuous and brutal year in Russian history. Tsar Nicholas II is on the throne, but the crown lies uneasily on his head. Socialist "fighting squads" roam the streets, hunting down and killing government agents; the fanatical Black Hundreds regularly attack the revolutionaries, particularly Jews, whom they detest; and the wealthy go about their business, enjoying fine food and entertainment as if society were not collapsing around them. 1914 was also the year of a celebrated chess tournament that attracted the greatest players in the world.

"Zugzwang," is a chess term that describes "a position in which a player is reduced to a state of utter helplessness." It also describes the condition in which the first person narrator, Dr. Otto Spethmann, finds himself. Otto is a psychoanalyst living in St. Petersburg who has long since renounced Judaism. A widower, he lives with his rebellious eighteen-year-old daughter Catherine, treats patients, and enjoys outings with his good friend, the celebrated Polish violinist, R. M. Kopelzon. His placid existence is unexpectedly shattered when a policeman named Lychev angrily grills him about the identity of a young man named Yastrebov, whom Otto has never met. As if this were not disturbing enough, two intruders burst into Otto's office, question him mockingly, and steal the file of Avrom Chilowicz Rozental, a mentally unstable but brilliant chess player. Why would these thugs be interested in Rozental, a harmless but emotionally unstable individual who is totally uninterested in anything but chess? Otto is bewildered by the inexplicable intrigue that has thrown his formerly predictable life into turmoil.

Another complication ensues when Otto falls in love with his patient, the beautiful and enticing Anna Ziatdinov. Besides the inappropriate nature of such a relationship from a professional standpoint, Otto has reason to fear Anna's father, Peter Arseneyevich Zinnurov (known as the Mountain), an influential and wealthy industrialist and a rabid anti-Semite. Zinnurov would be less than thrilled if he knew that his married daughter was having a torrid affair with her Jewish therapist. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that almost every major player is hiding something. More lives will be lost and reputations will be ruined by the time all of the secrets are at last revealed.

Bennett is an intelligent and thoughtful writer who vividly recreates the chaos of St. Petersburg during a period when it was difficult to distinguish friend from foe. Although the tsar, along with his ministers and generals, believed that heavily repressive tactics would keep the protesters from gaining power, the government's methods galvanized the opposition and sowed the seeds of the monarchy's destruction. As Spethmann says, "They could tighten the chains: they could arrest, imprison, persecute, and denounce.... It would make no difference.... Rage and numbers will tell."

"Zugzwang" is an intricate and at times confusing thriller in which chess figures prominently. As he struggles to keep his daughter and himself alive and well, Spethmann plays a cutthroat chess match with his friend, Kopelzon. The match may interest chess aficionados for the mental challenge that it presents. However, it is also a metaphor for the bitter confrontations between the various factions jockeying for supremacy. Only the most cunning and ruthless will ultimately prevail. The over-the-top conclusion is, alas, inferior to the book's tantalizing opening. Bennett loses control of events; too many implausible twists and turns mar the novel's final pages. Still, this well-researched work of historical fiction is worth reading for its vivid account of a conflict that left an indelible mark on twentieth century Europe.

Zugzwang is a highly entertaining thriller set in St Petersberg in 1914. An important part of the narrative is a chess game played by the two major characters. The game is documented in the usual way (Bennett's day job is chess correspondent for the Guardian) and the reader is helped by chess diagrams to remind us of the state of play before the next moves are discussed and played.

How irritating then to find in Chapter 21 that the diargram is wrong! Not only is is wrong but it shows an illegal position with the black king and the white queen on diagonally adjacent squares, white to move. 'Can White make further progress?' is the caption. Grrrrr! The diagram in Chapter 25 is also wrong.

The game can be followed in the text but no one of ordinary chess ability can follow the drama without getting out a chess board and laboriously following the game through to its zugzwang conclusion.

It is surprising that neither the author, publisher nor any of the reviews I have read picked up these elementary and obvious mistakes. We can only hope that they are fixed for future reprints of this otherwise super read.

Contemporary thrillers aren't generally my cup of tea, but I am prone to picking up historical ones if the setting is interesting or premise is unusual. Here, the setting of St. Petersburg, Russia circa 1914 was all I needed to dive in -- the winds of war gust about, and Tsar Nicholas II sits uneasily in his palace, his country beset by revolutionary terrorists. Amidst this tumult we meet psychoanalyst Otto Spethmann, a middle-class Jewish doctor concerned primarily with his practice, the welfare of his teenage daughter, and an ongoing game of chess with his composer/playboy friend.

However, before you can repeat the apocryphal line, "You may not be interested in the revolution, but the revolution is interested in you!" -- Spethmann is caught up in a very tangled web of intrigue involving Moscow policemen, the Tsar's secret police, Bolshevik cells, Polish terrorists, anti-Jewish aristocrats, chess masterminds, and the sexy daughter of a powerful man. Naturally of these many characters are not quite what they seem, and Spethmann's innocence is methodically stripped away by all the factions at play. The title is a German term for a chess scenario "in which a player is reduced to a state of utter helplessness. He is obliged to move, but his every move only makes his position worse." This is meant to highlight Spethmann's predicament, -- as well as that of the Tsarist government.

The story suffers slightly in two aspects. First is the running chess game between Spethmann and his best friend, which is illustrated with pictures of the state of play. As the story progresses, the tension between them grows, and the game takes on increasing symbolism. Unfortunately, Spethmann's interior discussion of the strategy is lost unless you understand the notation used for chess moves, and one's reading experience can't help but suffer. Secondly, the plot relies on too many characters having professional or personal connections to Spethmann -- there are just too many coincidences to swallow. So while the book does a nice job capturing the highly uncertain atmosphere of the time, as well as the ethical dilemmas faced by those like the good doctor -- the convoluted plot is just far too over-the-top to sink one's teeth into.

First an admission, I think Bennett is an exceptional author. His Havoc in its Third Year, and his first novel The Second Prison are fantastic. His ability to set scenes, to write convincing dialogue and to create the tension between the necessity and potential futility of taking a public stand in extraordinary circumstances are, in my view, unique.
Zugzwang, is a chess term for a state of hopelessness, a state in which no move the player takes will yield an improvement. It is a metaphor for most of Bennett's characters. This book introduces a plot centred around a chess tournament in Czarist Russia, and is unusual in that Chess positions are explicitly part of the text, and in that the book was initially serialized in the Observer newspaper.
The opening scenes of the book are excellent, the tension built chapter by terse chapter, and you can feel the instalment quality of the writing. There is a pleasing, for me, amount of characterisation, and a requisite amount of conspiracy, mystery and gunplay. However the ending is somewhat rushed and unsatisfactory, neither the complete vindication of the central character (not to be expected with Bennett), nor the more usual undermining of the characters aspirations.
This book is well worth the read, however if you are just coming to Bennett's work the other novel's mentioned above would be better places to start. One small point, as a chess novice, I would have welcomed an appendix to help with the chess move i.e.
1. e4 c5... 10 Nxd5 is code to me, I did some homework and found out how to use it.

This title's a chess term for when a player must move, but wherever the next piece shifts, the position's for the worse. An appropriate metaphor for 1914 St. Petersburg, where the Okhrana, the Tsarist thugs, battle with Bolsheviks in the streets, behind bars, and within the ranks of a corrupted police force. As a Belfast native who spent two years at Long Kesh for charges related to terrorism for his youthful participation in demonstrations, the author works best here in the realms of brutality vs. humanity under pressure-- as with "The Catastrophist" and "Havoc, in Its Third Year" (both reviewed by me on Amazon). With a Ph.D in history, Bennett also integrates vivid descriptions of places under turmoil-- the North of Ireland in "The Second Prison," Latin America in "Overthrown by Strangers," post-colonial Congo and mid-17c England in his later two novels-- with fragile protagonists who find themselves trapped by circumstance, fate, and bureaucracy.

Beginning promisingly, with a faint tone of snobbery and distance by the narrator, a psychoanalyst, Dr. Otto Spethmann, the story opens with a comparison. The city juxtaposes squalor with elegance; violence pulses beneath order. "Just as a superficial glance at a chessboard on which a game is in progress will reveal little of the fierce struggle implicit in the arrangement of the pieces, so the tourist delighting in the treasures of the Hermitage, the glories of the Summer Gardens or the exotic wares on display at the Gostinny Dvor will likely be oblivious to the vicious currents coursing through the very streets he meanders in such innocent admiration. Of the eleven players who took part in the great tournament of 1914, only Rozental came fully to understand that cruelty and violent death were not just part of St. Petersburg in the way they are routinely in any great capital but were the very essence of a city stalked by revolution." (6-7)

A dramatic set-up, one that traps Spethmann in the machinations of spies, a lover, and his daughter's own predicament. However, as the novel's told in the first person, key scenes cannot therefore heighten the suspense as much as is needed for the plot to captivate. It's akin to watching yet another installment of a superhero movie; you know Batman will not die no matter how harsh his situation.

Not that skill's absent. Bennett works well with the one erotic scene he includes; he combines tact with detail deftly. Thoughts on how compassion for the poor and a desire to overthrow the system corrode as idealism meets realpolitik certainly continue a fictional and fact-based theme Bennett knows intimately. I liked the chess game that's illustrated as the novel progresses; otherwise, contrary to one's expectation, there's far less overlap between the chess and the rest of the story elements than the title might lead you to suppose.

The novel wraps itself up eloquently. "What do you do if you are born into misery and deprivation? How do you look at your firstborn and not curse yourself for having brought flesh of your flesh into this place? And for those of us not born as they are, who do not know the fields of weeping, is the question any less urgent?" (269)

And, it's prescient, not only for the Soviet revolution three years later. "Rage and numbers will force the issue." Bennett's consideration of how forces of law and order rot returns to his fourth novel. No crackdown can stop the "settling of accounts." The tsar and his ministers "could tighten the chains," by persecuting and jailing. "Or they could loosen the chains," but mollification will ease no anger. "They were in zugzwang. When things reach this pitch we are all in zugzwang. Past wrongs will never be forgiven. Rage and numbers will tell."

The plight of Polish Jews, as Spethmann in his assimilated position as well as his headlong flight from his upended security comes to recall with discomfort, runs through the plot as a hushed leitmotif that might have benefited more from prominence. The contrasts between the high life Spethmann and his circle of secularized Jewish professionals aspire to and the ghettos from which their fathers sprung remains a promising subject, but Bennett's protagonist gets so enmeshed in Tsarist-Bolshevik double-crossing, complete with guns and fists and chases, that the reader may tire of the staged action scenes. The writer means to explore a worthy clash between those who've made it and those out to get them.

On the other hand, these dueling characters get heaped up by the finale into so many coincidental collisions that this defies even the conventions of the genre. It's like an arthouse film turned megaplex thriller. So, the literary expression of this contest between coercion and revolution, repression and rebellion blurs into too many frenetic exchanges. There's not enough depth in many key characters to care enough for them. This gap between the ideas that support the Reds and their Jewish sympathizers or collaborators and the sordid realities of betrayal, bloodshed, and bluster widens, even as the characters get overwhelmed by the plot points. That being said, the hasty conclusion does hint to me of a possible sequel, which may allow some of the faults of this ambitious, if overly rushed, novel to smooth themselves out.

(P.S. Michael Johnson among other Amazon reviewers observed that there are incorrect chess moves noted. I was relieved if irritated to find this corroboration, as I kept going over the notation frustrating myself and blaming my own rudimentary knowledge for the blunders as diagrammed. This discrepancy's a minor but embarrassing flaw that should be pointed out before better chess players open these pages and follow the moves.)

In the best tradition of Ronan Bennett, these 269 pages kept me awake all night.

Well researched setting of St. Petersburg in the early 1900's and sub-themes of judaism and terrorism (and some impressive chess moves - have to read it again and follow them) mixed with tight and faced-paced action entitle this book, along with others of Ronan Bennett's work, to its own genre: extremely intelligent political thrillers.

A debut writer myself, I only wish that one day I can write like Mr. Bennett.

" 'I am not a politician," I said. 'I do not have an answer.' "

That is the response of Dr. Otto Spethmann, Jewish psychoanalyst in 1914 St. Petersburg, to a Russian Empire terrorist's demand, " 'What is your answer?....What is the way forward?' "

Spethmann unwittingly becomes embroiled in the complicated maneuverings and machinations of various groups plotting to overthrow the tsar. He is no revolutionary; he has no desire to risk his not lavish but definitely comfortable life for the causes of the Bolsheviks and other underground factions. But one day he is questioned by the police about the murder of a newspaper editor. He disavows any knowledge of the crime, but the authorities demand that he and his eighteen-year-old daughter submit to further questioning. Soon, Spethmann realizes that his own apolitical world view isn't shared by family and friends; they are up to their necks in a life and death struggle to seize power.

Before Spethmann's life turned upside down, he and his best friend began a chess match, and it is in endgame as ZUGZWANG opens. In this particular game, Spethmann has a slight advantage and must make no wrong moves to have a change of winning. Since he has never beaten his friend before, he ponders every move carefully. Throughout the novel, the tense game progresses, typically closer to stalemate than to checkmate.

"Zugzwang" is the chess term for being "reduced to a state of utter helplessness," and Spethmann's options in the match and in his life seem to be pressing him into zugzwang.

Supposedly a celebrated psychoanalyst, Spethmann needs to brush up on professional ethics. He breaks confidentiality regarding one patient, and he sleeps with another! While in bed with the second patient, he pressures her about her session memory blocks. One gets the feeling (at least I did) that these abrogations are evidence that Spethmann habitually takes the path of least resistance.

ZUGZWANG's plot is intricate. The allegiances of the characters are almost as fluid as mercury -- at least from Spethmann's befuddled viewpoint. At times, the author can be accused of leaving some loose ends. For example, Spethmann's patient/lover is married, and it is reasonable to expect her husband's identity to figure conspicuously in the plot, but.... And then there is the international chess championship being held in St. Petersburg: although it is pivotal to the story, it, quite frankly, is more talked about than actually beheld.

Many readers will probably guess quite early in the novel the crime being planned and its modus operandi. However, the discoveries of who is working for whom, and why, keep the suspense high. And the conclusion does parallel the book's events and the chess game Spethmann has been playing.

ZUGZWANG has a few disappointments, such as the errors in two of the chessboard drawings that are also mentioned by another reviewer, and the dangling plot points already discussed. However, this newest Ronan Bennett historical thriller does thrill. And even though we know how the actual Russian Revolution began, Bennett presents a side of the roiling pre-revolution plotting and violence (by both government and agitating forces) seldom explored in popular fiction.

Spethmann thought not being a political animal would immunize him from having to face consequences of the power struggles in Russia (and Europe as a whole). He, like so many real citizens and residents of this vast land, desperately miscalculated.

Set in St. Petersburg in 1914, when revolution looms but chess tournaments play on, this exciting intellectual thriller traces the various forces contending for influence and power, in the city--the municipal police, factory workers, students, the secret police, Bolsheviks, Polish terrorists, and czarists, among others, with the newspapers and their editors wishing to report the truth but wary of choosing the wrong side in the ultimate battle. Despite the turbulent conditions, the city's lovers seek happiness, though they must often endure the same sorts of powerful reversals as political rivals. A chess game, which plays throughout the novel, is a metaphor for the moves and countermoves among the contenders for power the city and among the lovers searching here for love. Most appropriately, both politics and love reach a state of "zugzwang," that state in which one player is reduced to helplessness, obliged to move, with each move making the situation worse.

Dr. Otto Spethmann, a St. Petersburg psychoanalyst, stays out of the turmoil of politics, counseling two particularly fascinating patients. Avrom Chilowicz Rosental, a contender for the Grandmaster of Chess Award in the upcoming tournament, is a shy, sad Pole on the verge of a breakdown, virtually unable to communicate except on the chess board. Anna Petrovna Ziatdinov, a famed beauty tormented by memories, is the daughter of a rich industrialist suspected of funding the Black Hundreds and their attacks on Jews. Despite this "ordinary" life, Spethmann is drawn into an increasing spiral of violence.

A young man, found bludgeoned to death, carries Spethmann's card, and Rosental's file is stolen from his office. Spethmann and his daughter are arrested and interrogated, and the police, secret police, and anti-czarist extremists all pursue him for unknown reasons. Spethmann's friends may or may not be true friends, and his growing fondness for Anna, his patient, presages violence on the part of her husband and father. The connection of the pathologically shy Rosental to all the machinations remains a mystery throughout the increasingly violent action.

Irish author Ronan Bennett is a master of creating and using settings to showcase characters acting under extreme stress, and this novel is no exception. Though the action follows the thriller style, with a rapid narrative and fast-moving complications, the real focus is on the characters, not the plot. Spethman is an honest man trying to live his live in a most dishonest atmosphere, and the confusion he expresses as his life spins out of control draws in the reader who empathizes with his predicaments. As "zugzwang" is reached politically in St. Petersburg, Spethman also finds his familial and social ties reaching "zugzwang," a bleak outcome on all counts. Exciting, emotionally involving, historically realistic, and masterfully written, the novel appeals both to the heart and to the intellect. n Mary Whipple

Havoc, in Its Third Year: A Novel
The Catastrophist : A Novel
Overthrown by Strangers
Biography - Bennett, Ronan (1956-): An article from: Contemporary Authors Online

This is a very weird book, a mystery set in St. Petersburg just prior to World War I. It centers, in some way is driven by, a chess game and chess players. The title is a chess term, describing a position a player is put into by his opponent, where all of the possible moves only make his position worse.

Dr. Otto Spethman is a psychologist who plays chess in his spare time, though he's not a very good player. He's playing a game with a friend of his, a playboy and bon vivant, who chases girls, attends parties, is a better chess-player, and is also a good friend of a chess champion who in turn is not really mentally stable, at all. Spethman treats him to try and stabilize him so that he can play the world's best chess player in a match that's going to happen in St. Petersburg.

They are all Jewish, and of course the Russian aristocracy is suspicious of them and everything they stand for. The author does a pretty good job of portraying the world of the upper classes in Russia pre-World War I, and the characters are reasonably well-drawn. The plot, however, is pretty opaque.

As the story starts, Spethman is startled when the police come to question his daughter about a man who has been murdered. The police wind up keeping both Spethman and his daughter for several weeks, interrogate them intensely. When they are released, the plot begins to spin out of the author's control, getting muddled. There's a murder plot, imposters, and a plan to somehow win a chess tournament so that everything can go forward. By the end of the book the Bolsheviks have made their appearance, and Polish terrorists also.

I enjoyed this book, in spite of the muddy plot. I couldn't follow the chess game at all, really, and I think that hurt my appreciation of the novel. The characters and atmosphere are pretty well-done, however, so I didn't completely dislike it.

This reads like a cross between an Alex Delaware novel and an Erast Fandorin, without much of the flavor or period details that inform the later. Still, it's a reasonably engaging Hitchcockian, thriller; complicated but not convoluted. And the pace never lets up. (I trust the protagonist's self righteousness is the author's ironic flourish, as he's a dreadfully indiscrete and unethical therapist.)