The Australian
‘Humane fiction from the archives’ – Liam Davidson, 1 August, 2009
… Croome captures the mood and atmosphere of [1950s Australia] with remarkable assurance. The fear of reds under the beds at the height of Cold War paranoia was almost palpable and the novel is charged with a sense of muted urgency and anticipation of great events yet to unfold. Menzies had doubled his military budget in response to unrest in Korea, Indo-China and Malaya. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been sentenced to death in the US for betraying military secrets. The Australian Communist Party believed the revolution in Australia was less than five years away.
Tempering this brooding, rising tension is the stifling, claustrophobic fear generated for the Petrovs and their fellow operatives by the veiled threats and random acts of terror of an all-powerful, faceless party machine.
Croome is also alert to the farcical potential of international spy games being played out against the backdrop of small-town Australia in all its innocent naivety. There is something comic and disturbing about Vladimir Petrov’s foray into the countryside in search of hiding places for secret documents, only to be rescued from the side of the road by a helpful farmer.
Croome’s real achievement here, though, is his thoroughly convincing imaginative entry into the emotional lives of the main players in the drama. If readers may be familiar with a plot and context that have entered the national consciousness through media reporting and books such as Robert Manne’s definitive The Petrov Affair, they have not been privy to the emotional insights Croome’s confident treatment reveals. While he exploits the conventions of the political thriller with a keen sense of pace and of the dramatic potential of key events, the novel is essentially character driven.
Despite the temptation the archival material must have offered, he refuses to draw the Petrovs and their circle as two-dimensional types in service to a plot. Their motives are complex and credible, and Croome opens the door into the troubled shadow-lives of real people answering to multiple masters and emotions. His portrayal of Evdokia, the isolated figure at the novel’s centre, is particularly moving in its sympathetic presentation of the small details of her tragic past and her longing for family.
For those unfamiliar with the extraordinary events of the Petrov Affair, this is a more than engaging and accessible place to start. For those who know the sequence of events and their political consequences, Croome negotiates the complexities of the troubled times and brings a particularly humane perspective to a story that continues to hold the popular imagination.
Australian Bookseller and Publisher
‘Review’ – Matthia Dempsey (Editor), August 2009
2008 Vogel Award winner Document Z is based on ‘the Petrov affair’. Reading it as someone who had forgotten my already slight knowledge of the scandal (I could recollect the iconic photo of Mrs Petrov at Mascot airport and not much more) I found this a riveting read.
The Australian Literary Review
‘A sting in the betrayal’ – Stella Clarke. 5 August, 2009
Document Z is Canberra-born Andrew Croome’s first novel, and winner of last year’s $50,000 The Australian/Vogel literary prize for an unpublished manuscript. It offers a fascinating historical chronicle and an engrossing account of the personal cost of Cold War tensions. Croome revisits last-century Australia, a boom-time era when finding “reds under the bed” was an unnerving possibility. The 1950s were increasingly polarised between communism and capitalism, ideologies led by the Soviet Union and the US respectively, each of which encouraged defensive alignments from less powerful nations. The globally extensive boundary between them was thrillingly (for writers at least) permeable to spies and defectors.
… The Cold War may be very yesterday, but still exudes a nostalgic allure. Stalkers in trenchcoats, hard guns in hot pockets, high stakes sex and fancy gizmos: it’s never too late to capitalise on communism’s kinky provocations. Croome, however, takes a subtler route. Orderly, arid, half-made and understated Canberra, with its hard light and plain-faced, low-slung architecture, is not an obvious theatre for tenebrous espionage. The appeal of Croome’s novel has much to do with making Canberra strange. He disrupts our complacent domestic perspectives by inhabiting the fear-addled, alienated gaze of the Petrovs.
From her embassy base, Evdokia strives to comprehend the flawless ideal of the Canberra suburb, looks in vain for capitalism’s oppressed workers amid glowing children, jolly adults, a cornucopia of goods and the comfortable homes of the city. Canberrans, for their part, nonchalantly tolerate the presence of a crazed outpost of a murderous regime.
… Croome grabs our attention, initially, with Evdokia’s last chance to defect. He then sets himself the challenge of a complex exposition, trekking through the three-year lead-up to that critical moment. He might have moved more decisively into the viewpoints of his key players, instead of rather impersonally piecing together the small circumstances that build into their final desperate situation. It seems, for a while, as if Document Z is addressing a reader avid to trace the lineaments of conspiracy.
However, as Croome hits his stride it becomes clear this is not the case. It is all pettier than that, if ultimately no less dangerous. It’s the toxic emotional fallout from a rotten political regime that matters here… Croome’s attention to the intimate deceptions and inner crumblings of participants in the political game maintains the novel’s momentum. Document Z illuminates the shabby and tragic human limitations at the core of the Petrov’s dilemma.
… There are no pure motives here; the lesson is that war breeds opportunists on all sides. Croome revisits, with intelligence and flair, a remarkable moment in Australia’s recent history.
South Coast Register
Review by Katrina Dal Molin, 19 August, 2009
There is nothing quite as exhilarating as a superbly written spy novel, and that is exactly what Andrew Croome has delivered with Document Z. Like most convincing spy thrillers it is difficult to follow at times, with many layers and stories overlapping to create an intricate web of intrigue. Set in Canberra in 1951 when the Cold War was at its height, Document Z is a tightly told story of espionage, secrets, lies and political betrayal. Impossible to put down, this is suspenseful writing at its best.
Readings
Review by Kabita Dhara, 31 July, 2009
Document Z opens with a scene that may be familiar to many Australians – Evdokia Petrov being escorted onto a plane at Mascot airport by burly KGB agents, her face twisted in anguish. What follows is her defection to Australia to join her husband who had already gone into hiding, but it is this scene that Andrew Croome’s book hinges on, the obvious pain that was involved in the decision and what the Petrovs must have gone through before making such a life-changing, and potentially dangerous, move.
This is Croome’s debut novel and it is masterful in its examination of the human story behind the political story. Winner of the 2008 Australian/Vogel prize, Document Z traces the decline of the Petrovs, both members of the ministry for internal affairs in Russia (the MVD), as they start to realise the hostility they are facing within the Russian consulate, especially after the death of Lavrentiy Beria, the Soviet security chief.
A gripping read, it is surely a testament to Croome’s writing that he keeps you hooked to the end, even when the outcome is one that has been etched into the history of Australia’s Cold War years.