This is one of those novels that is a very thin disguise of real life. It's inspired by the author's own imprisonment, and one gets the sense that every detail here is something he experienced himself. I'm left to wonder, then, why he didn't write a memoir instead of a novel? (The otherwise useful introduction was no help on that point.) Anyway, it's a pretty grim read, enlivened - if that is the word - by a fundamental sense of humanism that still manages to find sparks of genuine admiration for most of its subjects, all of whom are either prisoners of jailers in Siberian exile. The constant grind of deprivation and dehumanisation experienced by said prisoners (and even by the jailers - as the protagonist points out, the practice of beating another person does as little for the character of the beater as it does for the beaten) is just one long, slow misery. Particularly depressing was the story of the consumptive prisoner, who - even on his deathbed - could not have his fetters removed. Even in his last unconsciousness there was an apparent need to maintain the symbolism of imprisonment, which seems to me to be an example of lacking compassion to the very last.

As a quasi-historical document, it has a lot of power. I wonder, though, if the strange sense of objectivity, of almost disinterested observation, is an artifact of the decision to make this ostensibly fiction rather than memoir. The protagonist does talk a lot of his own isolation and misery, but there's still that veneer of distance that makes this less emotionally compelling, perhaps, than it might be.