Neal Stephenson is one of the few living authors that I actively follow. I saw that this new work was historical fiction, different from the science fiction domain that he normally sticks to, but I hardly cared. Neal Stephenson could write about anything—absolutely anything—and I would be fascinated. His master of setting and character and their intertwining is remarkable and he just has this uncanny way of making everything he writes about so enthralling.

So I dove into this book with luster and I was not disappointed. The main protagonist Aurora is an interesting character, growing up half American and half communist agitator. Her parents emigrate to the Soviet Union when she's 3 or 4, but then they divorce a few years later and she doesn't see her mother for many years. She grows up in grueling poverty surrounded by people who are fanatics for the cause of Leninism before her story takes her back to America to conduct clandestine activities with her father.

The novel as a whole doesn't start with her childhood, however. It actually starts with Aurora as a young woman coming back to Russia after many years, working among other comrades in brutal conditions. His descriptions of the workers hacking away at a wall of ice that’s built up under the arm pit of this huge steel furnace is vivid and memorable. The brutal conditions are succinctly shown by them coming upon the body of a man who got caught out in the cold and whose body is frozen solid to the welding machine he was operating. When they try to free the body, it falls down into the furnace, which feels like a foreshadow of evil fates to come.

What comes next is the inevitable thing that all comrades must go through. Everyone has suspicion cast on them at some point; there is a great fear of spies and lots of political machinery is tied up in investigating everyone for being a potential mole or reactionary (read: western, anti-communist) spy.

But when Aurora's turn comes around to be interrogated, there are so many strange things about her peculiar story, that her interrogator is puzzled, and asks many questions. This gives the story a reason for Aurora to explain her life story up till that point, and is a framing story that starts off the novel in a compelling way. For a while the framing story is largely dropped, but towards the end it comes full circle and we get into some brutal scenes bordering on torture porn, albeit probably not unrealistic based on other stories I've heard of the era.

There's several impressive people in Aurora's life during her childhood in the USSR. Probably the most memorable is Veronica, the machine gunner in tall leather boots, with a commanding presence and brutal backstory. As a result, of the other comrades in their little community, Veronica has command of many unsafe situations that bewilder the other comrades. She's larger than life, impressive, and formidable, but her one soft spot is for Aurora. She is a counter-cultural example to Aurora at her most impressionable age of what it could look like to defy gender norms in this era.

An interesting theme that is pointed out a few times throughout the book is that in the 1930s and 40s, the USSR was probably the most progressive place in the world so far as challenging gender roles and letting women have any job they wished. The USSR provided more opportunities for women to break gender norms than America, in many ways. Many of the machine-gunners were woman, for instance. People argued that women were actually more adapt at this kind of warfare, likening it to running a sewing machine.

This early part of her story, during her childhood, is full of confusions and mind-warping ideas about communism, and I can't think of another example I've read that so acutely depicts what growing up in a radicalist type of environment would be like for a child. It’s heartbreaking to see little Aurora confused as a girl by all the things denied her in Russia because they’re “bourgeoise.” Playing "cowboys and indians" is bourgeoisie. Owning a comfortable chair is bourgeoisie. Having toys or nice clothing is probably bourgeoisie. Religion is bourgeoisie sentiment; traveling across the world to visit your dying mother is bourgeoisie sentiment.

And yet that is exactly what Aurora does when she is 18. She travels all the way to America, eventually meeting her mother in Chicago, but meeting a lot of her mother's anarchist people in the Northwest US first and working on a polo ranch there for a while. After her mother's death (which isn't really a spoiler; this is revealed early on in the novel), she teams up with her father again, joining a cell of communist agitators that are plotting to overthrow the American government in Washington DC for the sake of communist revolution.

My interest in this book doubled when George Patton shows up as our heroine's foil. General George Patton, as depicted by George C. Scott in the 1970 eponymous movie, is one of the more striking, vivid, memorable characters of all history. He was the best tank general the world has perhaps ever seen; historians argue that we may not have won against the Nazis without him.

Patton was as brilliant as he was controversial, enigmatic, romantic, politically incorrect, brash, and in a word: fascinating. One of his beliefs was that he was the reincarnation of Alexander the Great and many other great military leaders from history. His ego was boundless and he also epitomizes some of both the romantic and the toxic forms of masculinity, and yet--it would appear that in times of war, sometimes we need men just such as these in order for democracy to survive. I could write a whole essay about Patton; his story elucidates so much of the inherent conflict that liberal democracies must have with the strongmen that it must employ in order to survive. And unlike so many other strongmen, Patton is much more nuanced than being simply into his own selfish ends...but I must curb my enthusiasm and trim this tangent.

In this story, Patton is showing up earlier in his career before the days of WWII when he is elevated to a command second only to Eisenhower and God. This is pre-war, when he's just a young major, and this casts him in a different light than the movie Patton, showing his chivalrous, anachronistic side as he courts women and shows off in other ways. His role in this story is that he's onto the commies and he's going to root them out, and he provides an excellent foil to Aurora and her father's revolutionary schemes.

Set in pre-war America during the worst of the Depression, this book is an enthralling mixture of clandestine communist operations, scientific discoveries about cosmic rays, violent encounters with anti-communists, and the surprising connections the movement had with Chicago gangsters, post-Spanish War veterans, and--wait for it--polo.

Yes, polo is perhaps the most surprising aspect of the story, which explains the title "Polostan:" many works of historical fiction have been written about communism and leninism, but have you ever encountered one that details the movement's connection with cowboy anarchists in the Northwest United States and this group's affinity for polo?

On the face of it, nothing could be less communist than polo. Playing polo requires you to first, own a specialty breed of small, agile horse, second, train that horse to be okay with mallets swinging by their heads to whack balls around other horses cutting and jostling in close proximity, and thirdly, to invest considerable time and training to ride said horse and whack said mallets. A straightforward sport it is not. Bourgeoisie, much?

The people who played polo on the East Coast were usually high-ranking muckity-muck cavalry officers and, occasionally, their wives. Aurora gets herself associated with these people largely due to her polo expertise and helps them start a woman's club. This is viewed by her father as an act of infiltration and espionage, used to gain military insights useful to the communists as they plot their overthrow of the government in Washington, D.C.

But where did she get her polo expertise in the first place? The story covers this part of time as well, when Aurora travels from the USSR to America as an 18-yr-old in order to meet up with her mother, who is dying of cancer. Her mother is a part of the aforementioned cowboy anarchist's community, and we get to see a little of what that fascinating community is like in Montana and other Northwest states. It's really cool and I wish we spent more time there.

I'm not going to explore any more of how the plot develops because this book just hit the presses and I don't want to spoil anything. I will say that the ending was much more satisfying than I expected it to be. I'm also just impressed by how interesting he made this era, the scientific discoveries being made, and all manner of things that I previously knew nothing about.

This feels like one of those books that will stand the test of time and I will return to read again and again. I recommend it without reservation to anyone who wants to learn about a region of history you probably know little about, and enjoys well-crafted characters and plots.

Really, I don't know who shouldn't read this book, except perhaps people who insist on plots moving forward at blinding pace. I suppose the fastest plot it is not. But my interest never flagged for a second, because Stephenson is original, always fascinating, full of a plethora of interesting ideas and insights, and his characters are more real than life itself. I loved this book.