Constant Nobody

by Michelle Butler Hallett

For fans of Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light comes an historical espionage novel with a contemporary edge from Michelle Butler Hallett. The time is 1937. The the Basque Country, embroiled in the Spanish Civil War. Polyglot and British intelligence agent Temerity West encounters Kostya Nikto, a Soviet secret police agent. Kostya has been dispatched to assassinate a doctor as part of the suppression of a rogue communist faction. When Kostya finds his victim in the company of Temerity, she expects Kostya to execute her -- instead, he spares her. Several weeks later, Temerity is reassigned to Moscow. When she is arrested by the secret police, she once again encounters Kostya. His judgement impaired by pain, morphine, and alcohol, he extricates her from a dangerous situation and takes her to his flat. In the morning, they both awaken to the realities of what Kostya has done. Although Kostya wants to keep Temerity safe, the cost will be high. And Temerity must decide where her loyalties lie. Writing about violence with an unusual grace, Michelle Butler Hallett tells a story of complicity, love, tyranny, and identity. Constant Nobody is a thrilling novel that asks how far an individual will go to protect another -- whether out of love or fear.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Canada, Fiction

440 pages, Paperback

Published March 2, 2021

About the author

Author's surname is Butler Hallett, not Hallett.
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Michelle Butler Hallett, she/her, writes fiction about violence, evil, love and grace. Author of the novels Constant Nobody, This Marlowe, deluded your sailors, Sky Waves and Double-blind, and the short story collection The shadow side of grace. Her short stories are widely anthologized in Hard Ol' Spot, The Vagrant Revue of New Fiction, Everything Is So Political, Running the Whale's Back, and Best American Mystery Stories 2014 . Michelle Butler Hallett lives in St. John's.
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Butler Hallett's work, at once striking, memorable and difficult to categorize, wrestles with themes of power, evil, complicity, illness, identity, hope, love, and grace.

2016's This Marlowe wrestles with the agonies of faith, duty, and love against a setting of religious and political turmoil, quotidian surveillance, widespread fear for security of one's country, questions of how to help an influx of refugees, the weight of the body politic, and the state of the soul. The Miramichi Reader calls This Marlowe "a masterful work of historical fiction," adding that the novel "assuredly has all the intrigue of a modern spy thriller." The Toronto Star notes "Butler Hallett's prose is at once canny and tender ... perfectly paced and gracefully wrought, This Marlowe is superior historical fare," while Quill & Quire remarked "Complex, lyrical, and with a profound sense of a world long passed and humanity’s eternal motivations, This Marlowe holds up extremely well next to the most lauded recent historical fiction."

Butler Hallett's 2011 novel, deluded your sailors, follows characters in early eighteenth-century England and colonies, as well as in a republic of Newfoundland and Labrador in 2009. Linked to her 2008 novel, Sky Waves, deluded your sailors stares down abuse, identity and friendship in a startling story of violence, loss and love.

In Sky Waves, Butler Hallett draws on her radio background and her troubled relationship with history to create an ambitious work. Described by the author as "a demented 'aural' culture novel," Sky Waves is told as a drew, that is, as the ninety-eight meshes in a row of a fishing net. Characters and storylines are networked together, almost as a mural against a timeline of 1901 to 2005. The Maple Tree Literary Supplement called the novel "a dynamic and shape-shifting work that redefines the project of storytelling, which complicates oral/aural tradition."

Double-blind, which was shortlisted for the 2008 Sunburst Award.The Sunburst jury said "Sanity, madness, torture in the name of science -- Double-blind is wonderfully original while chillingly based in history... The writing is incredibly layered, with metaphor and symbol perfectly balanced against the hard neutrality of scientific language."

Of the story collection The shadow side of grace, The Globe and Mail notes "demons are at work - the kind that lurk in the subconscious and surface, depending on the individual, as either despairing visions or acts of outright brutality... Butler Hallett seems often to be creating from a subliminal place, riding on intuition, unencumbered by the counsel of editors."

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

How does one even begin to approach the idea of writing a review of a book that is so close to home? Constant Nobody is my wife’s sixth book. I have read it in every one of its incarnations going all the way back to its initial appearance as a one-act play.

Aside from the pure pleasure of reading a book in hand for the first time, not 8 1/2 x 11 manuscript pages, as well as no longer having to look for typos and substitutions, two things in particular assert themselves to me on this reading. The first is the intensity with which the reader is driven to empathize with the various characters, to understand their motivations, not necessarily at all to condone, still less promote, some of the things for which they stand. That empathy is crucial to being human. The second is the marvellous way in which the narrative is simultaneously hilarious and terrifying. Bureaucratic incompetence, simple human silliness, the ironic gaps between expectation and reality are all there, side-by-side with terrifying violence, brutal psychology, and some absolutely gut-wrenching imagery. These impulses can coexist with in a paragraph; sometimes they coexist with in a sentence; sometimes they coexist in the same word. Perhaps the greatest example is the joke about Stalin asking “who sneezed?” I won’t retell it; you’ll have to read the book, which I hardly recommend, bias or no bias!

[Debbie Hoonaard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Riveting, excruciating, addictive with a dash of humour.

[Chris]

I loved this novel, totally engrossing and the fascinating setup had a great payoff. I think I put that more articulately in this piece I wrote about this book and a few others: https://atlanticbooks.ca/stories/atla...

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

The main action of Michelle Butler Hallett’s complex, absorbing historical thriller Constant Nobody takes place in 1937, primarily in Moscow, capital of the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin maintains an iron grip on power. His paranoid and ruthless regime does not tolerate opposition, and the country is approaching the convulsive zenith of what became known in the West as The Great Purge: a campaign of official terror and repression that from 1936 to 1938 claimed, by some counts, more than a million victims. Politics aside, however, Constant Nobody is also a moving tale of love in a dangerous time. Michelle Butler Hallett begins the narrative in the Basque Country of Spain, where the Civil War is raging. Temerity West is a young British agent posing as a nurse. Kostya Nikto (whose last name literally means nobody), operating undercover as a journalist, is a NKVD (Soviet Secret Police) agent who has been dispatched to Spain to liquidate members of a communist political organization that opposes Stalinism. Kostya and Temerity encounter one another in a war zone: under the most terrifying circumstances imaginable. Kostya, after carrying out the assassination as instructed, and knowing that protocol demands Temerity be killed as well, instead, for reasons he can’t explain, spares her. A few weeks later, Kostya is back in Moscow reeling from physical and psychological wounds suffered in Spain and working out of NKVD headquarters, where everyone is stressed and fearful as the purge continues unabated with even long-time Stalin loyalists falling out of favour. Temerity is also in Moscow, on a new assignment, posing as a language instructor named Margaret Bush working for Comintern (Communist International was a global organization that promoted communist ideologies). A seasoned agent, she is cautious, watchful and discreet. But this is Moscow in 1937, and nobody is safe, least of all an attractive young woman alone on the street. When Kostya and Temerity encounter one another again, it is under very different if equally perilous circumstances. Temerity is rescued only because Kostya recognizes her and understands the fate that awaits her. Driven to act on her behalf for a second time, he manages by subterfuge to extricate her from a situation that he realizes will leave her physically and emotionally shattered. Then, with limited options, understanding the risk, he smuggles her into his apartment. Much of the remainder of the novel is devoted to Kostya and Temerity’s tempestuous summer of 1937: Temerity is confined, a virtual prisoner, to Kostya’s cramped flat. But she is not the only prisoner: both of them are walking a thin line, hemmed in by a political climate that shifts without warning, trapped in a world where allegiances are often illusory, trust is impossible and danger lurks around every corner. Under these conditions the ebb and flow of raw emotion takes a toll. Inevitably they clash. However, they also look to each other for solace and eventually reach a sort of détente. Though this too has its drawbacks: the tentative and brittle state of devotion and mutual dependence that binds them together may provide physical and emotional gratification, but it also leaves them feeling even more exposed and vulnerable. Their romance builds during a pressure-cooker of sweltering summer months, while the shadow of suspicion spreads over the city and darkens the halls of power. Finally, with former allies turning into enemies and Kostya’s NKVD defenders falling by the wayside, they are forced to act, and their lives are altered forever.

The unrelenting psychological tension and occasional brutality in these pages allow few opportunities for the reader to catch his breath. Some familiarity with Soviet history is helpful, perhaps essential, to making sense of the motivations of the many characters. As we have seen in her previous books, nothing falls outside the scope of Michelle Butler Hallett’s huge talent. In this novel she explores the psychology of fear as few are able and does so with absolute confidence. Temerity West and Kostya Nikto emerge into the reader’s mind fully formed: enduring, breathing, anguished individuals with richly contradictory, troubled inner lives. Without a doubt, Constant Nobody is a difficult, sprawling, challenging novel, but its power is undeniable. It represents a clear triumph of the imagination. The sheer artistry that has gone into shaping and writing this story is nothing short of spectacular.

[Jim Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm giving it 5 stars primarily due to the amount of research that has gone into this work of fiction. This is literary fiction at it's best, set in a time and place of great (but not necessarily good) changes. Temerity and Nikto are "lovers in a dangerous time" and Moscow in 1937 is not the time or place for love. Ms. Butler Hallett creates a mise en scene much like she did with This Marlowe: the reader is fully ensconced in the times of the novel and desires to stay there until the last full stop. Suspenseful and evocative.

[Sandra Bunting · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is a riveting story taking place mainly during the Spanish Civil War and Stalin's Russia during the Purge. Flawed characters we come to care about are caught up in the horrors of the time, even contributing to it. The absolutely brutal narrative will make you depressed and shocked but will keep you turning pages because it is beautifully written and compelling. I must admit I cried - the cruelty and inhumanity was overwhelming as were pockets of tenderness. A powerful book. Definitely worth reading.

[Jade DeLuca-Ahooja · Rating 2 out of 5]

u cannot have this toxic of a relationship AND be in the spanish civil war pick a struggle

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why this book: Recommended by my friend Chris in my literature reading group. Chris is a retired intel professional and said he found this novel powerful and recommended it for something different. So we agreed and selected it for our July discussion.

Summary in 3 Sentences: The book begins in the Basque region of Spain during the Spanish Civil War, with a male Russian undercover agent feeling an attraction to a female British undercover agent – each representing their home country’s efforts to report on and influence the outcome of the civil war. These two serendipitously run into each other again, but this time in Moscow in 1937 during Stalin’s purges, where our Russian is a mid-level executive with the NKVD carrying out the ugly work of the purges, and our Brit is undercover as a language teacher trying to get insights for Britain about what is happening in Moscow. Through a series of painful episodes, they become involved with each other, their relationship and their lives are extremely strained and constrained and we get insight into the horrors of Stalin’s purges through their experiences and efforts to survive and protect each other.

My Impressions: A powerful book about a horrific time in Russia’s history. It was dark, and is not pleasant to read about and confront the horrors of Gestapo-like brutality and power in the hands of men who have become dulled to the pain and suffering of others. But indeed it is a fascinating look at this very unpleasant side of humanity, and what it does to those carrying out murder on behalf of state.

Kostya Nikto (“Nikto” is Russian for “nobody”) our male protagonist was an orphan on the streets of Odessa and owes his life to an older and senior member of Stalin’s NKVD, and therefore feels abiding loyalty to the state and his surrogate father. As a human being, this loyalty erodes as he sees how thin the veneer of justice is on the horrors he is compelled to commit and support on behalf of the state. He struggles to come to terms with the legal executions he is compelled to commit as part of his “duty” – alcohol and drugs help dull his senses, and these are the refuges of many in his line of work. In his world, he has to accept the willingness of his comrades to accuse and report on each other to gain personal advantage and promotion. He is further confused by the feeling of love and sacrifice that he feels for the British woman Temerity – who goes by several different names in the book.

Temerity West (or Nadia, or Margaret, depending on the context) is a gifted, intelligent, ambitious agent for British intelligence MI6, and after her encounter with Kostya in Spain, volunteers for a tough assignment in Soviet Russia, and soon finds herself in over her head in the Moscow in 1937. She is undercover as a language teacher, part of a group of COMINTERN volunteers who believed Soviet propaganda about the worker’s paradise that Stalin had created, and are living in a Moscow dormitory teaching different languages to the youth of Russia. She, like the others, were constantly under surveillance and suspicion of being spies, or reactionaries, and were subject to the same arbitrary arrests, interrogations, and executions as Soviet citizens. When she is picked up on the street as an attractive young woman out walking alone, and kidnapped to be part of a “dessert party” for senior NKVD officials, her situation become dire, and at the party, her erstwhile companion Kostya coincidentally at the party recognizes her, and at great risk to himself, is able to spirit her away.

The remainder of the book is about their fraught relationship, their co-dependence in an environment where if either is compromised, they both die.

In the midst of evil perpetrated by regular people, acting out of fear and duty as tools of a powerful state, we also see acts of love and courage. It was interesting and reassuring to see manifestations of love in the midst of the “banality of evil.” The love story between Kostya and Temerity is also not a traditional love story – two damaged and yet courageous souls struggling to find a connection that has meaning and is deeper than the expedient and transactional relationships that had become the currency in a culture of fear and obligation.

Though it was not a pleasant read, I'll agree with my friend Chris - it does certainly evoke an emotional response and poses thought provoking questions about how much evil would one do and be accountable for under the authority of the state, and under the threat of torture and execution?  Really glad I read it. Won’t soon forget it. But I’ll be selective to whom I recommend it.

his is an abbreviated version of the review I wrote. To read the entire review, go to:
https://bobsbeenreading.wordpress.com...

[Bonnie Lendrum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Constant Nobody – A Tale of Espionage and Love
There are books in my library that I have reread several times since their first publication. Among them are Timothy Findleys’s Famous Last Words and Pilgrim, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Alistair Macleod’s And Birds Call Forth The Sun and The Lost Salt Gift of Blood and Carol Shields’ Unless. But until Michelle Butler Hallett’s Constant Nobody, I have never reread the same book within a month. It was even better the second time around.

Constant Nobody transports the reader to Moscow, Russia, in 1937. It is an immersive sensory experience. There were moments when it felt like I was in the front row of an intimate theatrical performance. I’d catch a whiff of perfume, feel my heart race as characters were awakened by knocks on doors, shiver when the shower water in a Moscow apartment switched from lukewarm to ice-cold, or breathe a sigh of relief after an injection of morphine dulled intractable pain.

Constant Nobody is a love story caught up in the espionage intrigue of Moscow, 1937. And as I write that sentence, I fear it trivializes Constant Nobody to historical romantic fiction which it most certainly is not. However, it is historical fiction that deftly depicts another time and place by attention to detail. And Constant Nobody is a love story that captures the depth of feeling between men, physician and patient, a man and a woman. But Constant Nobody is also an exploration of humanity. Throughout this novel, there’s an underlying question: How does one navigate a life that seems destined by chance? The answer might be “by free will and twice as much by compulsion.”

Constant Nobody, like Butler Hallett’s earlier novel This Marlowe left me in respectful awe of this formidable Canadian author.

[Edwin Lang · Rating 4 out of 5]

This realistic book moves quickly, from the very first page, and maintains this pace throughout. Taking place primarily in 1937, the story places its key characters in the climax of the Stalin’s brutal, relentless and callous purge of Russia that occurred between 1936 and 1938. There was no rationality behind who was arrested – people were simply picked up based on arbitrary lists compiled quite randomly by an NKVD bureaucracy – and, there is no coming back from arrest regardless of the unjustness. Getting arrested is frequently a death sentence; it is most definitely imprisonment. The decimation had been so great that when Hitler declared war on Russia in 1940 Stalin had few Generals left, at least few if any competent ones.

Temerity Jones, like her beloved much-travelled and bright aunt, and her father, both of whom had been in British intelligence, wishes to follow in their footsteps. She is assigned first to Spain, and then surprisingly as she had barely survived, almost immediately again to Moscow. In Spain, she had been posing as nurse Mildred Ferngate when she meets and treats an undercover agent for the NKVD (Soviet secret Police), Konstatin Arkadievich Nikto – ‘nobody’ – known as ‘Kostya’, treating him for gonorrhea and a boil on his toe. He had been there seeking a Dr Christobal Zapotem, a suspected member of the outlawed POUM (in english: the anti-Stalinist Worker’s Party of Marxist Unification) whom he’s been assigned to assassinate. He and Temerity share a (celibate) evening together discussing Russian fairy tales, during which she recites Shakespeare’s Sonnet 40 “All mine was thine …”. Kostya develops an affection for this petite but quick and confident British woman who like him is a polyglot and speaks Russian well, taking after her mother who had died in 1918 from the Spanish flu. For him then it is the start of a love affair. And when the good doctor returns Kostya takes him captive – as part of the ruthless process of eliminating members of POUM or any perceived opponent, ‘one bullet at a time’ - and in Dr Christobal’s case, for subsequent torture followed by a point-blank shot to the head. But when Kostya does not kill Temerity, he violates a mandatory guideline on the treatment of witnesses: leave none. This begins for him, a path that makes him wonder how far he will go for love when for the past twenty year he’s been trained to do, above all else, his duty.

Temerity’s assignment in Russia, still as a novice field agent for the British secret service, posing as a language instructor, makes one wonders what her boss, Neville Freeman, is up to in sending her into such an unstable and dangerous environment. In fact, she is almost immediately – seemingly arbitrarily – arrested in a random nighttime roundup. It so happens then that Temerity, while her arrest is being processed, is noticed by Kostya, completely by coincidence, who then interviews her and then saves her, driven by his nascent feelings for her. But being saved, without papers, involves Temerity in another form of captivity: being secluded, against her will, in Kostya’s apartment. He shares this with Dr Efim Scherba, a weak broken man, who had been assigned to heal Kostya’s shoulder, severely wounded when in Spain (killing Dr Christobal) during a German aerial bombardment.

So in addition to the slow burn of a muted love affair, Constant Nobody is a thriller, and in this it is a success. The story holds together, and is a tale well told. The book is a revelation to anyone not familiar with the Purge (as I had been), and to the organization and almost mindless behaviour of the secret police. But author Michelle Butler Hallett achieves this without darkening the story (or depressing the reader) and does a masterful job interleaving the lives of Temerity and Kostya amid the ruin of Russian society under Stalin’s paranoia. Moreover, I found Hallett’s writing to be non-judgmental: This is simply the way life was. It is as if the sadness associated with the horror is managed so that, as a reader, we experience the nightmarish quality of life for the Russian full on but thankfully not devastatingly enough that we wake up in a sweat after terrifyingly revisiting the scenarios in some awful nightmare. I don’t know how Hallet managed that but I appreciate her skill and kindness to her readers.

And it is also very much a drama. There are characters throughout such as Arkady. He is a NKVD officer and a founding Chekist, and when we meet him in 1937 he is a Major, but who since 1917 is something of a father-figure and mentor to Kostya. Arkady had found the boy close to frozen-to-death on a street in some Odessan street, and since then, unmarried and childless, had cared for him. He is a good man to Nikto but is not a good man because no Chekist can be good. While Nikto, like Arkady, is not a good man, for some reason there seems to be a spark in him. Perhaps there was some lingering influence his physician grandfather had had on him with whom he had lived as a young orphan until he too disappeared, presumably to serve Russian interests in some other capacity. Kostya, thirteen, found himself desperately poor and homeless, and the lowest of the low in Russian society: a bezprizornik. Kostya believes he is irrevocably broken and corrupted, and we tend to agree with him, but author Hallett obviously feels differently about the power of love, using Temerity, initially almost against her will, to salvage him, at least offer him the opportunity of life. Kostya sees Temerity’s continued presence initially in Spain and then in Moscow, as the hand of fate, now his destiny, a test (of character) and ultimately his redemption as a human being.

I liked the book and recommend it. It gives one, amid a good captivating and memorable read, a good historical sense of what Russia, and communism under Stalin, and people under all this, were like in 1937, in all their horribleness without the lecture and without being overbearingly maudlin.

Edwin

[Leila Marshy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another tour de force from one of Canada's most talented writers. Dense, smart, fascinating, meticulously researched, superbly written, iconic. Some scenes will stay with me forever. When I finished the book, I went back to the first page and started it again. One, because I did not want to leave the world she had created. Two, because it was so dense and thick with meaning I knew I had missed bits. But three, because I didn't want to miss a thing. Highly recommend.

[JoAnne Soper-Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

I opened this book and immediately sank deep into an alternate world, the former Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin, of purges, of midnight arrests that saw people torn from their homes and families for offenses that most likely didn't exist. And yet, Michelle Butler Hallett's novel is so much more than that. It is first of all a story about people, and believe me when I say these are characters you will become deeply invested in. British Intelligence agent Temerity West (Best. Name. Ever.) finds herself in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, fighting not only fascism but the disparate forces of humanity that may at any minute blow her cover. Foremost among these is Kostya Nikto (Nikto meaning "Nobody") a member of the Russian secret police, sent to Spain to assassinate a doctor. Temerity, masquerading as a nurse, should be in his direct line of fire, but instead of killing her, he spares her. Was it luck, fate, or something else?
Temerity, extricated from her post in Spain, is reassigned to Moscow where, against all possible odds, she meets Kostya again. Despite his devotion to his country, he is deeply moved by something he sees in her, perhaps because she is, in her own way, a soul as lost as he is. During a dangerous party at the home of his patron, where Temerity is destined to be sexually violated and most likely murdered, Kostya spirits her away to safety, thus putting his career, his reputation as a faithful Party member, and even his very life on the line to save a woman he barely knows. Now that's what I call courage. When his devotion to Temerity leads to personal disaster for Kostya, Temerity is determined to save Kostya, just as he saved her, and when they are finally reunited, the circle opened so many years ago in Franco's Spain finally closes.
Constant Nobody isn't a book you read so much as participate in. Butler Hallett invites you into the shadowy world of international espionage, where the stakes are torture, dishonour, and almost certain death. Her depiction of Stalin-era Moscow is chilling as well as chillingly accurate, a place where even the slightest whisper is cause for condemnation, and everyone is the enemy. It's a world where heinous acts go unremarked when they are committed by the men in power, where nobody is safe, not even in their own homes, where life is harsh and fear is the currency.
In the end, we are left with a poignant portrait of two ordinary people working in the service of their country, drawn together in circumstances beyond imagination. Butler Hallett is a master storyteller, with an innate knowledge of people, a keen observer of the finer details of a corrupt regime, even from the distance of history. A brilliant achievement and a book that will stay with you for a very long time.

[Marion Lougheed · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Lush" is the word that comes to mind for this book .Exceptionally well researched without getting bogged down in history. Heartfelt and very human characters. Butler Hallett doesn't shy away from the dark side of humanity, nor the effects that committing violence can have on a person. She brings in worldview without making her characters stand in for anyone else from a time or place, and she doesn't try to make them behave like modern people. No wonder this book won that prestigious award! Fair warning though: it gets pretty dark sometimes.

[Krista Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely could not put this down. Fast paced, the fear and suspicion living under the eye of the NKVD was palpable. My heart raced wondering what's next, what's next. Hallett's characters are beautifully written, human and vulnerable - believable. I don't know if I laughed, I wanted to cry but couldn't as I was whisked along with the characters into the next moment. Fear, nostalgia, duty, regret, loyalty, grief, anger... and hope, all woven through this gripping story.

I'm so glad I found this gem!

[Becca Babcock · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the kind of book that stays with you. Michelle Butler Hallett offers deeply troubled characters, characters who do wrong and yet still strive for right. Beautiful and unsettling.

[Logan Baker · Rating 3 out of 5]

More like a 3.5

[Jillian Pardy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This story is such an interesting take on love and historical fiction. I loved all the characters and the twists in the plot.