My Review of Anya Lipska's Where The Devil Can't Go

Anya Lipska's Where the Devil Can't Gobegins on a building site in London, where an incompetent young Polish builder and decorator gets strong-armed by the hero, Janusz Kiszka, for late payment of a sum of money he owes. The first few chapters develop the backdrop of East London and the fast money, back of a lorry, gambits to be enjoyed in the erection of sub-standard buildings for the Olympic Games.



Janusz's troubled character slowly comes into focus. A devout but doubting Catholic, a large man whose face carries every trace of worry and wear it has picked up since his twenties, unsuccessful in love, he is fairly well off due to the increase in the value of his apartment. He makes his day to day money from intimidation and other small time activities he would never have envisaged when he was a young science student in Poland.




A mistake Janusz made in Poland, at the time of Solidarity, cut him off from a potential, respectable career as a scientist. Now, he has become a sort of go-to man in the Polish working class community in London, partnering often with a loveable but obnoxious loudmouth named Oskar. Janusz navigates uneasily between the working-class Polish community and his priest, who takes him to meetings and events in respectable institutions, such as the Catholic Church and the Polish Embassy, that still smack of the old, aristocratic Poland. 




Janusz is asked to find a missing Polish girl in London. At the same time, the second major character of the novel, Detective Constable Natalie Kershaw, begins to investigate the case of a dead body found in the Thames. Then a second dead body appears, and Natalie discovers that they are both Polish. In alternate chapters, the reader follows Janusz on a physical journey from London to Gdansk (and its area) and then back again, on his quest for Weronika, while Natalie seeks out evidence to find out how the two young women died. At one point they cross each others pasts and if, at that moment, Janusz had dropped his guard and shared information Natalie's case would have been been quickly solved. But Janusz's distrust of the police, based to some extent on his experience in Poland, and the mistake he made, prevents him from talking.




On his physical journey to discover the truth, Janusz also engages in a historical journey (which illustrates why the novel is titled, « Where the Devil Can't Go »), that gives the reader an interesting resume of the the Solidarity movement, the struggle to throw off Communism, the way in which informers were used by the Polish secret police to rat on their fellow citizens, and how all that is still influencing the behaviours of a few present-day Polish politicians.




Janusz is also very aware of the difference between the Polish generations, the old generation that is glad (for the most part) to have said goodbye to Communism, but that is still suffering from the wounds totalitarianism inflicted on the Polish psyche, and the younger generation, which works hard in England but whose main hedonic pursuits seem to be ego-centric, superficial and dismissive of anything older people wish to tell them about the past.  On his physical and historical trip, at every step of which he is unknowingly spied upon and led where others want him to go, Janusz, who has worked in London for more than twenty years, comes to the realization that he no longer speaks the language of the place where he was born. He has become one of those Poles who has been away too long. He will never go back home.




Janusz and Natalie both discover towards the end of the novel that all the initial assumptions they had made about their respective investigations were wrong. Natalie finds out why the two young Polishwomen died. In the process of discovering what has become of Weronika, Janusz unearths a sordid tale of collusion with communism and that, in his quest to find the young girl, he had been less of a hunter than the prey.




The novel is well plotted, with many surprising twists, and it's very well written. The book ends in a very satisfying display of fireworks, in which Janusz and Natalie finally come face to face with the bad guys. But that's all I'll say about that. I don't want to spoil the novel for everyone of you whom I encourage to read it.




I bought the book because of its Polish theme and I was not disappointed. Anya Lipska's description of the surprise Janusz felt when he goes back to his home town of Gdansk, which no longer resembles the colourless, joyless town he left behind, reminded me of the gap between the miserable cities of Warsaw or Toruń I first saw in 1990 and the illuminated, sophisticated and trendy places they had turned into only 10 years later, after they'd had a few years to reconnect with their sophisticated, pre-Communist past. 




Although most of the comments about the book I have seen so far tend to concentrate on Janusz Kiszka, I was just as delighted to read the chapters featuring Detective Constable Natalie Kershaw, a young Londoner, who is determined to show her wise, big-hearted Sergeant, « Streaky » Bacon that she is a good detective, while resisting the barrack-room humour  of her male colleagues, as she tries to resist falling in love with a fellow cop. I hope that Anya Lipska will be able to develop both Janusz and Natalie in future novels. I will certainly be among the first to buy them.