Master and Margarita, The

The Master and Margarita is a novel that could not have been published when the author was alive; indeed it was pretty remarkable that it got published when it did, some 26 years after his death. The book weaves three separate strands together in its narrative. The first is 1920s and 30s Moscow, visited by the Devil in the form of Professor Woland and his crew of bizarre assistants (including a talking, shooting, bipedal cat). They set about destroying the comfortable pretensions of the jobsworths who superintend apartments or run theatres, and in particular the smug literary world, through displays of impossible, wild, unpredictable, cruel, bloody and sometimes fatal magic. The second is set in Jerusalem (named Yershalaim in the book), where Pontius Pilate is about to sentence a charismatic leader accused of inciting the population against their Roman overlords. Again, the name is altered, shifted from Jesus to Yeshua; and the characters are different, too. Pilate is tortured by the problem of goodness and obedience, while Yeshua dismisses some of the claims made for him by his followers but remains powerfully, luminously strong yet tender. The third strand binds these two together, and features the Master and Margarita themselves. He wrote the story of Pilate; but dispirited by its rejection by the establishment, he despairs of his work and himself, burning the former and committing the latter to an asylum. Margarita never loses faith in him or the book, and enters into a Faustian pact to save them all. These interweaving plot lines are told either with extraordinary brio or brilliant control.