74 Books & arts The EconomistOctober 17th 2020
O
veracareerspanningalmostfour
decades William Boyd has written
many kinds of bestselling novels, from
black comedies to literary thrillers. His fin-
est books, such as “Any Human Heart”
(2002), trace a protagonist’s life against a
backdrop of 20th-century upheavals. “I al-
ways think a life without complications
isn’t really a life,” remarks a character in
“Love is Blind” (2018), which swashbuckled
across fin-de-siècle Europe. Those wrin-
kles and nuances render the people he
sketches convincing and compelling.
“Trio”, his 16th novel, is no cradle-to-
grave epic. It unfolds over a single summer,
shadowing (as the title suggests) not one
character but three—a film producer, an ac-
tor and a writer. If it lacks the breadth of Mr
Boyd’s immersive life stories, there are am-
ple complications to engage readers in the
threesome’s struggles.
It is 1968 and filming is under way in
Brighton of a Swinging Sixties movie,
“Emily Bracegirdle’s Extremely Useful Lad-
der to the Moon”. For Talbot Kydd, the pro-
ducer, every day brings a new fiasco. His
problems come to a head when he discov-
ers that someone is stealing film stock and
his business partner is defrauding him.
Anny Viklund, an American starlet, is en-
joying an illicit affair with the leading man
until her ex-husband, now an escaped con-
vict, shows up out of the blue. Elsewhere
Elfrida Wing, the long-suffering wife of the
film’s director, tries to overcome ten years
of writer’s block, only to be thwarted and
steadily broken by alcoholism and her phi-
landering husband’s latest betrayal.
In time, each is forced to delve deep into
their “private self” and decide who they
really are and what they really want. Talbot
is living a lie and yearns to open up his “un-
developed heart” and obey his true desires.
Anny becomes a fugitive who must weigh
up her means of escape. And in the book’s
darkest sections, Elfrida moves from
drowning her sorrows to thinking about
drowning herself.
This is an absorbing novel about lives
spiralling out of control and the drastic
measures required to right them. Rotating
between perspectives, the story is made up
of a series of dramas that can be read as sep-
arate if intertwined tales or as components
in a satisfying whole. In “Trio”, in other
words, three is never a crowd. 7British fictionSecrets and lies
Trio.By William Boyd. Viking; 320 pages;
£18.99. Published in America by Knopf in
January 2021; $27.95Y
ulia tsvetkova, an artist and activist
in the far east of Russia, wanted to dis-
pel the taboos that surround women’s bo-
dies and sexuality. At 27, she had founded a
community centre in her home city of
Komsomolsk-on-Amur, where she hosted
feminist and lgbtevents. She produced
plays for children that questioned gender
stereotypes, ran a sex-education blog and
celebrated same-sex relationships on so-
cial media (incurring a fine for disseminat-
ing gay “propaganda”). She also shared sty-
lised drawings of female nudes in an
online group named after the play “The Va-
gina Monologues”.
Among her sketches was a series called
“A Woman is Not a Doll”. In one image, a
woman sits with her legs apart, accompa-
nied by the slogan, “Living women have
body hair”. In another (see picture), a
shapely figure in bikini bottoms and a sun
hat perches among the words, “Living
women have fat—and that’s normal!”
Supposedly on account of these and
other pictures, police raided Ms Tsvet-
kova’s home last year and arrested her on
charges of “distributing pornography”.
When her case comes to trial (no date has
yet been set), she faces up to six years in
prison. In the meantime, the ludicrous ac-
cusations have galvanised protests against
the country’s increasingly conservative au-
thorities. Ms Tsvetkova’s queer, feminist
art has become an emblem of embattledwomen’s and lgbtrights; artists and cam-
paigners have taken to Russia’s streets, put
on exhibitions and posted nude images of
themselves in her support.
“These subjects have never been dis-
cussed by the whole country, among such a
large number of people,” Ms Tsvetkova re-
marks from her home town some 3,700
miles east of Moscow, where she was under
house arrest for several months this year
(she is still unable to travel). Russian
schools offer no sex education themselves,
and public discussion of gay rights has in
effect been illegal since 2013, because of a
law that bans the “promotion of non-tradi-
tional sexual relations” to minors. The case
against Ms Tsvetkova was launched after a
prominent anti-gay campaigner reported
her; she says she has received death threats
from far-right groups. “How good it is that
so many people care about this idea of
women’s freedom,” she reflects. Those be-
hind the supportive rallies “are very brave”.
Indeed they are: people speaking out on
her behalf are being punished, too. Last
month activists in Moscow organised a
screening of “Vulva 3.0”, a German docu-
mentary that explores the history of female
anatomy; the National Guard shut down
the event and demanded a copy of the film.
Courts have fined single-person pickets,
who have held banners bearing slogans
such as “My vagina is not pornography”
and “We are all Tsvetkova”.
Artists have been persecuted before for
challenging the regime’s conservative
stance. The jailing of members of the punk
collective Pussy Riot in 2012 heralded a
harder line on dissent; this summer Kirill
Serebrennikov, a controversial director, re-
ceived a suspended three-year sentence for
fraud. Rappers, film-makers and perfor-
mance artists have been targeted. But Ms
Tsvetkova’s plight has drawn an especially
broad response. Galina Rymbu, who has
written poetry in solidarity, says the prot-
ests are part of a pushback against regres-
sive laws, in particular the decriminalisa-
tion of most domestic violence in 2017.
“If the state wants to kill us, it has the
opposite effect. We will save ourselves and
come together,” insists Ms Rymbu, some of
whose work is published in Britain this
month as part of a translated anthology by
the feminist collective F-Letter. Feminist
ideas have spread in Russia even though
the cause has sometimes seemed “hope-
less”, Ms Rymbu says, amid government ef-
forts to portray the feminist and lgbt
movements as insidious Western imports.
Ms Tsvetkova is under no illusions
about her chances in a legal system in
which more than 99% of trials result in
convictions. “I’m researching the law and
violations of rights in Russia,” she says. But
she is also “looking into the prison system
and rehabilitation of prisoners. And I’m
still doing some drawing.” 7MOSCOW
Russia is persecuting a feminist artistArt and punishmentBody and soul