It’s difficult to get more than a few dozen pages through Neal Stephenson’s 1930s-set Polostan without thinking that our current world, for all its disasters and unfortunate surprises, is, by comparison, just a terrifically boring time to live. That is not to say a great novel couldn’t be written about this decade. Even an author of modest talents should be able to spin up a thrilling fiction that jaunts a character between the battlefields of Ukraine, the 2020 street protests, and democracy crackdowns in Hong Kong with side plots nested in right-wing militia conclaves, disinformation research nerve centers, Silicon Valley tech overlord dinner parties, and wokeness-wracked academic conferences.
Yet even with all our era’s sturm und drang, so much of it feels inconsequential. Some of this could be due to an inverse presentism, a suspicion that anything taking place in the short-attention-span present will not have any lasting impact beyond contributing to a general sense of chaos. For people with those suspicions or just a love of roustabout historical fiction, Polostan is a welcome gift.
As the first volume of a projected trilogy, Polostan avoids the tendency of such books to serve as a crowded place setting for everything to come. Rather than spreading his narrative across a half-dozen main characters that he spends the next two books stitching together, Stephenson packs everything readers might want in their characters into one woman and lets her run with it. (Given Stephenson’s tendency for thousand-pagers, one wonders if he wrote this whole thing as one book and the publisher argued him into chopping it up.)
He introduces Dawn Rae Bjornberg at a clandestine meeting with a mysterious engineer in 1933 under the shadow of the under-construction Golden Gate Bridge. Secret agendas are hinted at, and a mission is suggested. Several weeks later, the teenage Dawn is working as a translator in Magnitogorsk, the Soviet industrial city whose massive steel works were meant to rival anything in capitalist America. Neal Stephenson then flips back to Dawn’s childhood in the post-revolutionary tumult of early 1920s Petrograd (previously St. Petersburg) before jumping to her and her father joining the 1932 Bonus Army march where thousands of veterans descended on Washington, D.C. demanding their promised cash bonuses from World War I.
It’s a heady mix. Dawn’s place in all this is unclear at first. We are given her biography in bits and pieces whose running theme is mobility. She was raised in the West by cowboy anarchist types who were just as likely to jump in on a labor action with the Wobblies as they were to rob a bank and shoot it out with federal agents (the latter being a skill Dawn has to draw upon later in the novel). Her “Papa” is a different kind of dissident, a doctrinaire agent of the Soviet Comintern secretly fostering revolution in America, which seems to be less about organizing labor and more about using the Bonus Army as a wedge assault force that will end with the working class storming the U.S. Capitol.
Even though the still-adolescent Dawn is swiftly ping-ponged from one dramatic set piece to another, her bright intellect and language fluency help her passage, and Stephenson keeps the narrative relatively clear. Like any book where the protagonist drops into one world-changing event after another, Polostan‘s plot can read a bit jerry-rigged. On the one hand, it makes perfect sense that Dawn would hide out for a time in a Chicago kommunalka (Soviet-style communal apartment), given the city’s position as a magnet for immigrants and activists who found a lot to like in the city:
…miscellaneous comrades from all over who had been drawn to the South Side by the combined attractions of free speech, cheap rent, nubile college students, a vast and rumbustious proletariat, jazz, and lots of people in surrounding neighborhoods who could cook them the food, and speak to them in the languages, of Poland, Lithuania, Germany, Ukraine, Yugo-Slavia, Hungary, and the shtetl.
On the other hand, placing Dawn in Chicago is also a good excuse to send her to another set piece: the city’s sprawling and eye-opening 1933 “Century of Progress” World’s Fair. There, she can witness all the techno-utopian marvels spinning up people’s imaginations around the globe in dreamy ways that seem fantastical in our era’s more bleary-eyed modernity.
Dawn’s motivations beyond survival become somewhat less defined as the Polostan‘s story continues. Though she is somewhat distrusting of her father’s tunnel-vision ideology and eventually personally experiences the terror meted out by Soviet fanatics like Beria (a sulphurously sadistic torturer who makes a dark appearance later in the book), Dawn’s cross-cultural background and semi-nomadic childhood make her a natural spy.
Seen from one angle, Dawn is a ludicrous creation. Her Swiss Army knife roster of capabilities (expert horse rider, dab hand at costume changes and blending into different social settings, quick study in weaponry, head for figures, more strategic patience than any teenager in recorded history) is as broad and unrealistic as the skillsets filmmaker Luc Besson gives his fembot assassin heroines. In addition to Dawn’s horse-riding skills, she also turns out to be a top-notch polo player, which was not uncommon in the Wild West at the time, where many ranches raised polo ponies for American and European elites obsessed with the game.
Neal Stephenson’s dedication to period research is impressive, and Dawn’s polo playing not only provides access to fancy society circles (helpful for her espionage assignments) but leads to her meeting a young but already semi-deranged General George S. Patton. Odd and interesting as all this is, some readers may check out during her relentlessly detailed polo matches.
Nevertheless, that idiosyncratic determination on Stephenson’s part should be admired, especially as he does not let it ever quite slow down the story. Unlike with some of his more ponderous works (2015’s Seveneves and certain stretches of 1999′ Cryptonomicon), in Polostan, Stephenson rarely takes his foot off the gas. The confluence of epochal events—particularly the contrast of Depression-era America spinning towards chaos and a Soviet Union still flush with revolutionary fervor that had not yet curdled to cynicism—provides an inherently dramatic setting for Dawn to perform her deft pirouettes of survival.
As the first volume of Neal Stephenson’s projected “Bomb Light” trilogy, Polostan appears to be just laying out the backdrop for a larger build toward Soviet infiltration of the Manhattan Project. This presents numerous opportunities for Dawn to use her skills. Whether that will include playing a polo match with Robert Oppenheimer, a skilled horseman, remains to be seen.