Rasputin's Bastards is a psychic spy novel set during the 1990s, in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War. One thing that author David Nickle does very well, both here and in his earlier book Eutopia, is to use free indirect verse to depict in close third-person the perceptions of people who are under the sway of some form of mind-control or illusion. Which, as you might imagine, is pretty important in a psychic spy novel.
In Nickle's vision of psychic spycraft, there are spymasters called 'dream-walkers' who can go into sensory deprivation tanks, project their consciousnesses into the world, and can take over the bodies of specially conditioned agents, called 'sleepers.' The sleepers don't know they've been conditioned and have no idea that they're spies. Whenever a dream-walker is piloting a sleeper (or has given them instructions to complete on auto-pilot), the sleeper experiences themselves as returning to a comforting daydream of their childhood.
All the spies we meet are the products of a secret underground Russian science city, and the plot is about them finding new purposes now that the Cold War is over, the USSR is gone, and no one living remembers them.
The structure of the novel is such that we open in media res, and primarily follow sleepers, so we learn the truth of what's going on at the same time they do. All the viewpoint characters have important secrets, kept even from themselves, in their pasts, and so even as the overall plot moves forward, we also keep moving further and further back, through the accumulated lies of their lives, to discover the truth about each of them.
The story opens with a Canadian human trafficker buying a group of children from a Turkish arms dealer, a deal that takes place on the ocean between a yacht and a submarine. The deal goes badly when several sleepers intervene, and when it turns out that the children themselves are a new generation of powerful psychics, capable of dream-walking in anyone, not just a specially conditioned agent.
The children want to go to Canada to be free, former spymaster Babushka wants the children and every sleeper in the world to come to Canada so she can psychically rule over them, rival spymaster Fyodor and his sleepers want to intervene to thwart Babushka, and the gangster wants omnidirectional revenge on everyone for messing up his deal.
It's a rather complex conflict, whose sides and stakes become clear only gradually, at the same time that the viewpoint characters are gradually becoming aware of the truth of their lives. Nickle handles this juggling act well, both in terms of the overall pacing, and in terms of planting seeds of doubt and unease at each stage that blossom into new revelations in the next.
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