Zugzwang, by Ronan Bennett

Ronan Bennett, the Belfast-born novelist, likes to confront big themes – a crisis of faith, a betrayal of friendship. And he does so with a sombre eye. His previous novel, Havoc, in its Third Year, was a tense parable of Puritan fanaticism set in 1630s England. Having grown up in Troubles-ridden Northern Ireland in the 1970s, Bennett understands the importance of religious and political loyalty. As an 18-year-old Catholic schoolboy, he was wrongly convicted of the murder of an RUC inspector.

Zugzwang, his fifth novel, unfolds in pre-Revolution St Petersburg and is a mesmerising tale of shifting political allegiances and double dealing. Unusually for a fiction these days, Zugzwang was serialised in a newspaper. It shows signs of hasty plot-sketching, yet remains a taut historical thriller.

Dr Otto Spethmann, a psychoanalyst of Baltic Jewish origins, is sucked into a web of anti-Tsarist intrigue in St Petersburg in 1914. The city, in Bennett's vivid description, is crawling with Tsarist spies and nationalists affiliated to the anti-Semitic Black Hundred movement. Implicitly, Bennett draws a comparison with present-day fears about Muslims as he explores the Tsarist assumption that all Jews were potential Bolshevik terrorists.

Down in the factories and naval yards, meanwhile, the workers are growing restive as anti-Tsarist resentment grows. Carefully, Bennett introduces a cast of newspaper editors, chess prodigies, and Polish émigrés who orbit round the august presence of Dr Spethmann: a mild-mannered intellectual and chess fanatic whose daughter Catherine turns out to be a revolutionary.

The 1914 St Petersburg chess tournament is under way ("Zugzwang" is a German term for "checkmate"). Against a background of cynical chessboard politics, more Jewish homes and businesses are raided in government clampdowns on "anti-Russian" subversives. Dr Spethmann struggles to make sense of the dangers crowding in on him. Should he betray his daughter's revolutionary associates and so save her – and possibly his – life?

Along the way, Bennett conjures a sense of imminent social collapse, as Bolsheviks distribute propaganda and Tsarist spies skulk under bridges. Though Zugzwang lacks the narrative suspense of Bennett's acclaimed novel The Catastrophist, it is still a gloriously readable thriller. Bennett is now the closest we have to Graham Greene; he looks squarely at the human condition, and attains a rare gravitas.

Bloomsbury, £14.99. Order for £13.50 (free p&p) on 0870 079 8897

Interesting? Click here to explore further