Travelling through Central Asia in 1996, Frederick Lyre learns of
his best friend's disappearance and changes plans to go and find
him. Picking up the trail in Moscow, he ventures south to the post
Soviet depths of Rostov-on-Don and further into the hinterlands of
the fragmented Soviet Union, where he is led deeper into the
tangled fate of his oldest friend. Uncovering hidden
characteristics and unexpected motives, Frederick fears that his
friend, presumed dead, has been caught up in a tragic sequence of
events leading to his destruction. As a rite of passage, a journey
of discovery, a travelogue and a psychological portrait of
friendship, the novel draws the reader into the hidden world of
being which beats beneath the semblance of reality. The story is
intricate and evokes another world, of suburban Rostov tenements,
of dachas in the Steppe, of Tashkent, Khiva, Bukhara, Samarkand,
Moscow, the Nyeskuchniy Gardens, the River Don, making love in
Tanais, of the sea of Asov, the northern Caucasus, of Stavropol, of
refugee camps in Ingushetia, mountains, and field hospitals in the
Caucasus, of fin de siecle London, and Aquitaine. From the
viewpoint of Frederick, a young man of 23yrs, seeking his friend
Cazimir, in the Northern Caucasus in 1996, the narrative blends
observation about Russian people and culture, the Don Steppe,
post-Soviet urbanscapes at the turn of the century with intimate
and sensitive meditations on love, sex, death, religion, God, one's
place in society and money, and investigates the potent forces of
sexual desire, attraction and adolescent mental health, coming to
terms with the powerful subconscious drives of lust, desire, and
obsession. Written as an interior dialogue, with reported
conversation, notebook extracts, poems and transcriptions, the text
is varied, raw and sometimes uncomfortable. The voice of the
narrator Frederick is constant, but on discovery of notebooks
written by Cazimir, we learn from Cazimir's first-hand writings,
which illuminate his thoughts, despairs, motivations and
obsessions. Exit Rostov is a story of friendship and the ends to
which one will go to save it. A story of love in its various forms,
of the unrequited, the fulfilled, of new love and love that has run
its course. A story of how individuals and companies took over
ex-Soviet assets and territories, in the aftermath of the Soviet
Union's demise, with Public-Private Partnerships. A story of
intelligence gathering, Sufi-Islam, of art's supremacy over
politics and how other people seek to control others at any cost. A
story of how setting out with the best intentions can be fatal.
It's a story of discovery, learning how to find people hiding in
the layered depths of their divided and most essential, secret
selves. www.henryvirgin.com
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