The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott

Book Review by Sara McKee

A whole new perspective on Doctor Zhivago

“You and I, it’s as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together to see if we know what we were taught.”

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

My experience of Doctor Zhivago was primarily watching the 1965 film directed by David Lean and featuring the dreamy Omar Sharif and Julie Christie as the ill-fated lovers; Yuri and Lara. Not every critic has been fulsome in their praise of the movie, yet revolution and love story do work in tandem when set in such vast landscape and so much snow!

I don’t think I’ve ever actually read Pasternak’s classic novel. It was published in 1958 and won the Nobel Prize in defiance of punitive Russian censorship, although in his lifetime Pasternak had to refuse it.

I discovered a whole new perspective when reading ‘The Secrets We Kept’ by Lara Prescott (apparently she was named after the female protagonist in Zhivago). I had no idea that books were used by the newly formed US Secret Service as weapons of mass destruction during the Cold War. But it’s hardly surprising when you consider words have power to reach out in ways we can’t comprehend. Particularly when those words are banned in your own country.

Lara Prescott weaves a colourful tapestry of characters. The love story of Sally and Irina, compared and contrasted with that of Olga and Boris. The risks taken, the lies told, the words unspoken and the pain endured is mirrored in the stories of the spies, the writer and his lover as well as Zhivago and Lara. I was compelled to keep reading well into the night as I felt all the emotions – fear of the knock on the door, outrage at the misogyny and overwhelmed by the courage.

One of those books you don’t want to end. Now, I need to read Boris Pasternak’s words.

5*