‘The Forest of Souls’ by Carla Banks

Published by Harper Collins. 6 March 2006.

ISBN 0-00-719211-8

When Helen Kovaks is garrotted in an isolated house containing an archive of a Russian scholar, suspicion immediately falls on Nicholas Garrick, the young caretaker. But Faith Lange, Helen’s close friend and fellow researcher, discovers that Helen had been unearthing information about WW2 war crimes in Belarus. Was it this that led to Helen’s death? And can it possibly be true that Faith’s adored grandpapa Merek was a war criminal as well? But what about Helen’s aggressive husband, Daniel, who warns Faith to stay away from his children?

Freed from any context, the phrase ‘the forest of souls’ sounds poetic or whimsical. Coupled with the front-cover image of a forest at night in which three burial crosses are starkly illuminated, like a scene from The Blair Witch Project, the phrase becomes chilling. The reality is even more horrific: Kurapaty Forest, near Minsk, was where the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, murdered over 100,000 people. Soon afterwards, Belarusians were systematically slaughtered by the invading Nazis, mainly in the Maly Trostenets extermination camp.

It is against this background of war atrocities that Carla Banks has set her novel. In the crossfire between Soviet and Nazi atrocities there were divided loyalties, heroes and traitors - and the past has a habit of catching up with the present. ‘You must understand,’ says the elderly Sophia Yevanova to investigative journalist Jake Denbigh, ‘that, for some of us, the fascists came as liberators, at first’.

This is a brilliantly constructed novel. While it contains much information about the complex history of Belarus, the storytelling never suffers because the details are so subtly and vividly integrated. A particularly deft stroke was to capture a child’s-eye view of mass executions and deportations in the forest through a series of stories starting with the fairy-tale words, ‘This is the story of…’ Readers are left to fill in the gaps with their own imaginations, making the horror all the more poignant.

Carla Banks is the pen name of Danuta Reah. On her website she says that the character of Marek Lange was inspired by her own father, who was born in a forest some eighty miles from Minsk. Perhaps, then, this novel is an intensely personal one.

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Julian Maynard-Smith

Danuta Reah is the author of the dark psychological mysteries Only Darkness, Silent Playgrounds (US title Listen to the Shadows), Bleak Water and Night Angels. She is a past chairman of the Crime Writers’ Association.