Night Train to Odesa by Jen Stout review – finding defiant beauty amid devastation of war

Seeking respite from the destruction wreaked by missiles on Kharkiv, Jen Stout snatches a few moments by the river. The author of Night Train to Odesa has already borne witness to the blown-out windows of the Derzhprom (the city’s avant-garde Soviet showpiece), the bombed-out schools, the high-rises where cats now roam. But the sight of fishermen “still as herons” and swallows that dart in “dizzying patterns” send “little waves of happiness wash[ing] through [her].”  

It is Stout’s openness to the beauty that survives amid the dereliction, and the joy that survives amid the despair, that makes her book so extraordinary. Though true to its subtitle – “covering the human cost of Russia’s war” – it is less a threnody than a triumphal hymn: to our capacity for love and endurance in the face of unthinkable brutality. 

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Stout was not a war reporter when Putin invaded in February 2022; she was a Shetland-based journalist on a fellowship to Moscow. As all those on the fellowship were evacuated, she faced a choice: return home or try to find a way to report on Ukraine, a country she had visited five years earlier. She chose the latter.

It was a daunting prospect for a young woman with no financial backing or hostile environment training. There were those who regarded her as foolhardy, even reckless. The figure she cuts – a tiny powerhouse in an over-sized flak jacket doggedly making her way from one bombed-out city to the next – is as poignant as it is impressive. 

But Stout’s inexperience is also an asset. Ukraine is more to her than her latest tour of duty and her affinity with its landscape and culture bubbles over into descriptions so vivid they glow in the dark. She is especially good on Ukrainian food, investing “pickle, fried meat patties and potato salad liberally layered with dill,” and “honeycomb, skewered, freshly dripping” with a sensuality born of hunger, and an understanding of the importance of hospitality when so much else has been stripped away. 

Night Train to Odesa is not short on objective analysis. Stout explains the unlikely alliance between Kharkiv’s LGBT+ activists and the right-wing Freikorps militias who used to disrupt Pride marches, and the intergenerational tensions in places like Odesa, where older people, while still intensely Ukrainian, feel a residual nostalgia for the Soviet era. But she is never dispassionate. In Odesa, in Kharkiv, in Kyiv, in Dnipro she forms intense bonds with those she meets, empathising with their fears, sharing their griefs.

She does not shield the reader from the worst horrors, such as the eight-year-old boy living in the basement of a block of flats who writes “God Save and Protect Us” on his drawing or the site of the mass grave at Izium. But the heart of Night Train to Odesa lies in those times when she finds herself singing folk music or dancing in an underpass. Its defiance, vitality and perseverance are powerful antidotes to the cruelty of Putin’s imperialism.

Night Train To Odesaby Jen Stout is out 2 May (Polygon, £17.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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