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Reviewed by John Murphy

There are a lot of things I could say about City of Thieves. I might comment on its gritty evocation of a specific time and place (1942 Leningrad under Nazi siege), its likable characters, gallows humor, or its sturdy plot. The salient point is this: I stayed up half the night finishing it.  David Benioff, a young author whose previous novel, The 25th Hour, was turned into a Spike Lee joint in 2002, understands the fundamentals of effective storytelling: likable protagonists with a clear goal facing seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

City of Thieves, for all its grim depictions of wartime horrors and atrocities, is a buddy movie at heart, readymade for its inevitable, and in this case welcome, transition to the silver screen. The odd couple is Lev Beniov, a virginal chess whiz Jew, and Kolya, a sex-addicted aspiring novelist (in fiction, is there any other kind?). Their bantering, bickering friendship might have begun with the pair thrown together as assigned dorm roommates, but this is wartime Leningrad so Lev and Kolya meet as cellmates, each accused of a crime punishable by death. But instead of summary execution, they are given a surreal mission by a colonel with a soon-to-be-married daughter: find a dozen eggs (for the wedding cake) in a city of starving inhabitants subsisting on rations of stale bread, occasionally supplemented by glasses of dirt mixed with sugar or the boiled binding of library books. In other words, a dozen eggs might as well be the Holy Grail.

A prologue suggests that Lev’s story is based on the true experiences of Benioff’s grandfather. If so, storytelling is in the genes since Lev’s first-person account conforms to so many satisfying conventions of the Hero’s Journey: the Quest, the Mentor, the Lion’s Den, the Return, etc. This lends the narrative a sort of secular spirituality, since Benioff’s protagonists are stuck between two Godless regimes: fascist Germany and Stalinist Russia, both of which substituted a belief in God-given human dignity for a survival-of-the-fittest conception of the world: “The Germans believed in the lessons of Darwin’s mockingbirds–life must adapt or die…We were doomed, and the Germans were only playing their mandated role in human evolution.”

Nazi and Communist officials may have thought in these coldly abstract terms, but a writer’s sympathies are with the daily, desperate struggles of human life, and Benioff’s insistence on his characters’ dignity, even drollery, under nightmarish conditions is more Catholic than Communist in its commitment to the core value of the human person. And I’ll bet Benioff, who also writes screenplays for a living, has already cast his movie. If it’s half as compelling as the book, it’ll be a good one.