These Are the Names comprises two ultimately converging story lines set against the background
of the raggedy edges of the former Soviet Union. In roughly alternating chapters the novel
introduces us to protagonist Pontus Beg - police commissioner in a large but apparently
fictional Russian city - and then to a group of refugees - mostly in the person of the boy - as
they make their way across the steppes in the heart of winter. Beg is a marred but sensible man
troubled by the onslaughts of age attached to his creature comforts a reluctant detective who
shies away neither from kickbacks nor from allowing his hot temper to get in the way of his
better judgment. It is Beg who in many ways drives the novel we meet him just as he is on the
verge of an important discovery about his own origins. The illegal aliens have been dropped on
the steppes by an Eastern European version of a coyote and are dragging themselves towards
the fata morgana of the West. Their journey is a thicket of terrors the climate is a monster
intent on devouring them alive the journey is one of attrition the dying fall and are
stripped of their belongings before death even comes and in the course of that journey the
members of the group come close to and even pass that nubbin of humanity that separates them
from the beast. When the group finally arrives on Pontus Beg's turf emaciated and feral the
lives of the police commissioner and the boy cross in a significant way. When the police find
evidence of a murder in the refugees' baggage however Beg becomes the group's inquisitor and
finally something very like their savior. Characterization is the key here: it is the skill
with which Wieringa keeps Pontus Beg's quest for his own background suspended in space it is
Beg's likeability as a character and his dry-eyed musings considering the nature of religion
that keep the reader pinned to the page from the start. At the same time the apocalyptic
atmosphere of the group's exodus across the steppes becomes increasingly vivid and laden with
meaning as the novel proceeds in seeming synchronicity with the development of Beg's
character. In the hands of a lesser novelist These Are the Names could have become a Martin
Beck imitation or a Dutch version of McCarthy's The Road. But this Tommy Wieringa's latest is
infinitely more than that.
