A Fantastic Steppe Adventure

Kirdy: The Road Out of the World by Harold Lamb
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Set in 17th Century Russia, with Poles, Russians, Tartars, Turks, and representatives of many other ethnicities and communities, this is the story of a young Cossack given a mission to track down a traitor who successfully posed as the Tsar's son until he was forced to flee Moscow. Kirdy is the grandson of Khlit, a character who famously appears in many short stories from the age of pulp. At the beginning of this novel, Khlit is quite old, and when they learn that Otrepiev, the man who was supposedly the son of the tsar, the man currently oppressing the cossacks, was actually a fraud and a cossack himself, he sends his grandson to track him across the steppe and kill him.

That chase is the entirety of the novel, but the cool thing is that the story never flags. Kirdy is an honorable man, a tough man, unafraid and capable, and makes for a great hero. (It is no surprise to learn that Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan and Solomon Kane, along with adventurers like El Borak, was influenced by Lamb's writing.) He encounters a beautiful, confident, tough Cossack woman named Nada, and they journey with a variety of other comrades, including his huge borzoi-wold hybrid, across the frozen land, chasing a man named Otrepiev through winter and through war. The great thing about Lamb is that he is a historian and makes his stories completely plausible, with accurate details about the land the people. It helps that he has obvious respect for the various inhabitants of central Asia and generally shows them in a favorable way, or at least fairly. (Some stereotypical characterization remains, but he was way ahead of most Westerners in the 1920s.)

This is a hard-driving action story with some romance (especially in the older sense of heroic or knightly adventure) and just a touch of fantasy feeling. The plot is a lot of fun, well paced and unforced, and is a pleasure to read. I think this was meant to be a novel for older boys, but technically that description includes me, so...

Recommended.

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