Deathless by Catherynne M Valente

I've been on some sort of fairy tale kick lately. I'm not really a big reader of high fantasy but I do have a weakness for stories based on fairy tales or with a fairy tale setting. I don't mean fairy tales in the sense of Disney princesses, but grown-up fairy tales of old full of symbolism and ancient significance. Generally people think of the Brothers Grimm and German folklore for this sort of thing, but if you want your fairy tales really weird, my advice is to look east and read some folk tales from Russia.

Deathless by American author Catherynne M Valente is based on elements of those stories, set against a backdrop of post-revolutionary Russia and the siege of Leningrad.

Marya Marevna is the youngest of her sisters, beginning her life in the city known as St Petersburg and rapidly seeing it reinvented, first as Petrograd and finally Leningrad. As a child, she repeatedly witnesses young men, who have appeared first in the form of birds before assuming a human shape, arrive at the door of her family home to propose marriage to her older, more beautiful sisters. Finally, as life becomes increasingly difficult following the revolution and Marya reaches the age of 17, a mysterious man arrives one day for her.

That man is Koschei Bessmerty, or Koschei the Deathless, an immortal figure from Russian myth who intends to take Marya to his home and marry her. On a superficial level, Koschei could be Marya's fairy tale prince, but it's clear that Koschei is charismatic rather than handsome and seductive rather than charming. And if you've ever read any the folk tales in which Koschei appears, you'll know he is very much the villain.

Things do not, however, pan out quite as you might expect, because despite her young age, Marya is by no means naive. She is no stranger to the supernatural and no stranger to hardship, and upon meeting Koschei for the first time, she realises that she likes watching men kneel for her and accepts his proposal, leaving her old life behind without saying a single goodbye.

On their strange, almost hallucinatory journey to Koschei's homeland of Buyan, where he lives in a mysterious castle uncannily like the Kremlin, Koschei feeds Marya blini piled with caviar every night and takes her to a bath house where he engages in the traditional Russian banya ritual of whipping her with birch twigs. If you're thinking his motives for this might be a little suspect, you'd be right: it's fairly obvious that the health benefits of this are not what is uppermost in either Koschei or Marya's mind. At the same time, Koschei makes it clear that he is fully prepared for Marya to be his ultimate downfall - in fact, he expects it. And as the strange story of their marriage unfolds, the two become locked in an intense, even violent battle for supremacy, all while their destructive, angry love for one another remains unwavering. 

Koschei's parallel, magical Russia is brilliantly realised on the page, sometimes beautiful and sometimes brutally grotesque. Baba Yaga, the hideous cannibalistic witch of Russian folklore (and, it transpires, Koschei's older sister) is skin-crawlingly repellent, while Marya's friends and servants are strangely endearing in their unrelenting weirdness. As Koschei and Marya live as man and wife, they oversee an endless war with yet another of Koschei's siblings, the Tsar of Death (Koschei is the Tsar of Life, having made himself immortal by hiding his own death in a magic egg, because of course he has). And all the while, they are both aware that it's Marya's destiny to betray him.

Throughout the novel there are clear links made between the darkness of Russian fairy tales and the darkness of Russian history. As Marya moves between Koschei's Russia and her own, which like Koschei's also becomes ravaged by war, there's a sense that there is no escape. As characters in both worlds frequently observe, 'the war is always going badly', whether it's the war between the Tsars of Life and Death, the Second World War, or the internal war of Koschei and Marya's own relationship. Sometimes, the worlds overlap, and a strange village is home to alternate versions of figures from the recent revolution - Lenin, Rasputin, the Romanovs. 

Now and again, the satire is clumsy, primarily where the author treats the tyranny of Joseph Stalin and the basic principles of communism as one and the same, and while there are plenty of references to the hardships suffered by ordinary Russians in the wake of the revolution, it doesn't seem to have occurred to Valente that ordinary Russians suffered under centuries of the tsars too. But overall, the book reads like an unsettling dream: surreal, confusing, symbolic and startling, sometimes harrowing, occasionally funny, and at times unexpectedly sexy.

Those looking for a Sarah J Maas or Naomi Novik-style high fantasy, fairy tale romance will not find that here. Every relationship in Deathless is dysfunctional, with everyone using everyone else to their own ends. Koschei and Marya are fierce, damaged people shaped by their environments, capable of brutality, betrayal and cruelty, to one another. There's a bleak sense of predetermination to their fate. I loved this book, but the characters are twisted, broken people living in a twisted, broken world.