Chlorophilia Novel 2009 AST, Moscow Rights sold: Serbia

Sample English translation is available.

Synopsis

People turning into vegetation is the premise of this penetrating dystopia from Andrei Rubanov, prize-winning author of the prison novel DO TIME, GET TIME

Moscow, the 22nd century. Saveliy Gertz works as a journalist for The Very Best, a major Moscow weekly. The magazine writes about those Russians who continue working while most of their compatriots produce nothing, but mostly consume. Money is no longer a problem: Siberia is rented out to the Chinese, and the Russians live on the rent, cheering themselves up with the slogan "You don't owe anyone anything".

The strangest thing, however, is that Moscow is overgrown with giant grass. Each stem is 300 meters long. It is impossible to cut it or to root it out: it grows back instantaneously. What’s more, the pulp of this grass is a powerful psychostimulant that causes pure joy, without, it seems, any consequences. The drug is consumed in many forms: the rich take it as a sublimed concentrate, and the slum dwellers devour it raw.

The grass totally changes the metropolis’s social structure and value system. The supreme value is the sun that is blocked out by the rampant grass. One’s social status depends on the floor where one lives. The ninetieth floors are occupied by the elite; the sixtieth by the middle class. The twentieth are true slums, and the people who live there are called the pale.

As for other kinds of values, the pale grass-eaters don't really have any. They can lie still all day long, basking in a feeling of pure joy and watching  The Neighbors, a popular reality show. Consuming the grass is technically against the law, but is not prosecuted... until it is discovered that the seemingly harmless grass gradually turns people into itself: into plants, that is. And the first people to start literally striking root are not the pale, as one might have expected, but the upper-floor residents, who consume pure joy in concentrated form.

Among them is the protagonist Saveliy Gertz, and his pregnant wife Varvara. Their story evolves against the chilling background of the unenviable future of Moscow. When people begin to disappear, and the lamentable truth of their disappearance is revealed, the urban thriller morphs into a western. Fearing that Varvara will give birth, not to a healthy baby, but to a "little green man," the couple flees from Moscow to the countryside.  There, in a special colony, doctors and volunteers are trying to save the grass-eaters and prevent them from turning into the plants. At the same time, they must risk their lives trying to get along with the savage locals. Saveliy, who now often wants to just stand still basking in the sun, faces a difficult choice: to put down roots, to stop thinking, to turn into a plant completely—or to struggle to remain a human being. 

Rubanov is one of the most fearless of contemporary Russian writers. An established master of realistic fiction, mostly based on true stories, he has created a penetrating anti-utopian vision that spares no one. The reader is poised on the cusp of curiosity and terror—so ingenious, and so terrifying at the same time, is this brave new world.

Back to author