Smiting the Bear

Known in his day as a spy, art thief, forger, womaniser and gambler, Archibald Brinsley Fox was an unlikely witness to the barbarous Civil War which claimed ten million lives in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Smiting the Bear is the journal of his extraordinary adventures in the wasteland of 1920-21 when the War climaxed with the near-demise of Russia.

Fox had remained in Russia long after the other Revolutionary tourists fled; determined to steal a Faberg Egg and seduce Lenin's erstwhile mistress, Inessa Armand. Alas, a meeting with Armand, by then the most powerful woman in Revolutionary Russia, propels him into a deadly skirmish and on to the ghost cities of Moscow and Petrograd; haunted by hunger, gangsters, Cheka (secret police), rapists, corrupt apparatchiks, disease and the 'besprizornye'; wild orphans (roughly seven million by the 1920s) who roam the streets in packs mugging and murdering, sometimes just for kicks. Naturally, desperate women abound too, a particular danger for venal Fox.

Fleeing into the heartland of rural Russia, he is badgered into a peasant militia, compelled to partake in cannibalism and forced to attend elaborate tortures openly celebrated by an entire village. Fox also bears witness to commonplace horrors and historical events that were shrouded in mystery until the secret Soviet archives were opened to historians in the 1990s; confirming the veracity of Fox's shocking account.

A perpetual turncoat not overly burdened with morals, Fox is on thin ice from the outset. And it duly cracks for the final time when he stumbles into the last great uprising against the Communist Dictatorship: the famous Kronstadt Rebellion of 1921. He knows it can only end in tears but, alas, he has no way out.

Praise for Hennessey's first novel, Drowning in the Shallows, a contemporary satire published by Headline (Hodder and Stoughton) and a commercial success in the author's native Scotland:-

"... a terrific story... one of the funniest, sharpest debuts of the year - dry, witty and cynical as hell."
- The Big Issue

"From the crackling start to the end of this debut novel the wit and pace are relentless and magnetic... the sexual swagger which underpins it all gives it style and presence."
- Scotland on Sunday

"Brilliant, intelligent and consuming writer... things ebb and flow through a series of exquisite interior monologues while his control of pace and tone are remarkably mature."
- The List

"An unflinching, brilliantly observed debut novel of love and sex."
- Publishing News

"... writes with tremendous energy and delivers excellent lines, supporting the manic comedy... Hennessey tells it with style."
- Sunday Herald