Archer, who has in the past convinced readers of his penmanship with for instance Kane and Abel or the Clifton Chronicles, tells the story – or rather stories – of two Russian refugees, who long before the fall of the Iron Curtain escape the KGB.
After the father is murdered, Alexander Karpenko and his mother Elena face a choice: suffer the same fate or escape. As they are about to jump on a ship, the toss of a coin determines which ship it is going to be: heads New York, tails London. And so the reader embarks on two journeys: one to America and the other to the UK. Instead of choosing one destiny for his two characters, Archer confronts us with a twin storyline, boldly exploring both possibilities. He paints two different characters, leading two different lives, confusing the reader one chapter at a time.
And why not? While real life makes us choose one road and mercilessly lets us suffer the consequences of every choice we make with no chance of turning back, this story doesn’t want to make us choose. The reader can have it all.
Both stories show a protagonist who bursts with potential and manages to become very successful: the English Sacha attends Cambridge and starts a career in politics as a Labour MP and the American Alex ends up as an entrepreneur and chairman of a bank. In both lives, however, he gets in trouble, which reveals that, despite the different choices and lives Archer creates for Karpenko, fate nevertheless plays an important part in the story´s universe.
At one point, there is a compelling twist which, for a moment, creates the impression of being in a science fiction novel, where we see Sacha traveling to New York, meeting people who know Alex and Alex travelling to London, meeting people who know Sacha. However interesting such a scenario might have been for many a reader, Archer quickly moves away from it and we are back in the binary setting and two separate lives. All in all, the book covers three decades in which we see the main character and his mother struggle, love, win, and lose.
What gives Heads You Win a touch of Greek tragedy is the fact that there are some things that, no matter how hard the character tries, he cannot escape. There is an inevitable moment, that comes crashing down on him, no matter his efforts to avoid it. In both cases, he realises that he must return to Leningrad to confront his past and so the story takes us back to Russia, but with two nevertheless completely different outcomes.
Heads You Win is brilliantly crafted, thought through down to last little detail and, despite the almost 700 pages, is a very fast and all throughout entertaining read. Archer´s style is as smooth as it is compelling and some of the twists are sure to cause jaw dropping. A book definitely worth reading!
