Helen Dunmore: Chronicler of a city under siege

Known for novels about intense, twisted relationships, her new book commemorates Leningrad and its long-suffering people

High above the hum of central Bristol, from the sun-filled eighth-floor hillside flat where Helen Dunmore comes to write, you can see the city spread below like an anatomical diagram. Its skeleton stands out in bright relief: streets, shops and stations; hospitals, offices and schools, all fuelled by food and power and data, and all connected with the wider world in a thousand subtle ways. From this angle, modern urban life looks like a supreme leap of faith.

"You think, 'It's crazy'," says Dunmore, seeking the long view from this luminous eyrie a couple of miles away from her family home. "How did we get ourselves into this position? With millions of people packed together, and no natural resources at all ­ completely dependent on a constant flow of things coming in." And what would happen if someone suddenly switched off the oxygen supply: the nourishment, the oil, the electricity, the information? How long before all this intricate civility broke down into barbarism? Last autumn, it took a few short days of protests over fuel tax to give, for today's Britain, a dismaying answer. The 900-day blockade of Leningrad that began in summer 1941 provides a far more inspiring one.

Helen Dunmore, born in Yorkshire in 1952 and best known as a poet until she published her first novel in 1993, tells the story of that blockade in The Siege. "The city is very much a character in the novel," she stresses. "And its bloodstream becomes frozen." With a tight focus on two generations of a single family, the book restricts its timescale to the first, terrible winter of the Nazi encirclement. It recreates the fathomless suffering and heroism of Leningrad with a precision and pathos that will delight her existing fans and astonish newcomers to her work.

"As a reader, I want to be drawn into something so that I emerge from it blinking," she says. "My ambitions go farther than that." Not just blinking, in this case, but shivering: the horribly compelling depictions of hunger and cold in The Siege wiped out the first warm weekend of the year for me. "I find cold very exhilarating," Dunmore says. "I always have done. I love snow and ice."

Although a slim, blonde and elegant figure, she's scarcely the glacial enchantress out of a fairy tale that this remark suggests. On the contrary: she talks with tremendous warmth about The Siege, as if its cast had just left the room, and as if the city beneath us were not Georgian England's Atlantic trade-counter but Peter the Great's monumental window on the Baltic: "Floating, lyrical, miraculous Petersburg, made out of nothing by a tsar who wanted everything and didn't care what it cost." Yet the savage drama of The Siege took its toll: "Emotionally, I found it very, very difficult to write, and very exhausting."

Lest anyone dismiss this as arty hyperbole, consider the subject-matter Dunmore has transformed into a finely balanced work of art. Within weeks of the German invasion, the city was completely cut off, with the bulk of the Red Army tied up in the frantic defence of Moscow. Hitler gave an order (reprinted as a chilling preface) for Leningrad to be shelled, bombed and starved into absolute annihilation. Behind this special malice lay Nazi racial dogma, with its classification of Russians as Slavic Untermenschen. "Leningrad, more than any other city in Russia, revealed high culture," Dunmore explains, "and so revealed that the Hitler theory of racial inferiority was incorrect. If a subhuman group could produce a city of this proportion, beauty, sophistication and complexity, then, obviously, it was rubbish." So the Russian showcase of classical vistas, treasure-house museums and advanced industry had to be reduced to the swamp whence it arose.

Over the winter of 1941­42, perhaps a million people died. The emaciated dead lay in great piles on ground too hard to take them in. Or else they lingered as silent witnesses in frozen rooms, while the living eked out pitiful rations (two slices of heavily adulterated bread a day), burnt books and furniture for a little warmth, and boiled wallets or wallpaper paste into a sort of soup.

Yet, as The Siege movingly shows, the barbarism remained outside the gates. "Civil society did not disintegrate," affirms Dunmore. "Under enormous pressure, people did maintain the forms of life. The city, morally and spiritually, was not destroyed." Above all, in the novel, Leningrad's women keep hope alive: Anna, the daughter of a dissident author, who works as a lowly nursery assistant; her father's former mistress, the actress Marina, who dies to save Anna's little brother Kolya; and Evgenia, Anna's foul-mouthed, street-smart friend, part-time whore and full-time heroine, the uncrushable symbol of a city and a people ferociously determined to survive.

Then, through an extraordinary paradox, the worst of times brought a better time. In the depths of winter, as the death-rate rocketed, a road of ice across nearby Lake Ladoga froze hard enough to allow truck convoys into the stricken city. By February, the "Road of Life" carried 2,000 tons of food and fuel every day; and ships replaced the lorries in the spring. Although the Germans did not retreat until 1944, Leningrad was saved.

The Siege lifts on to a grander stage two abiding aspects of Helen Dunmore's work. First is a long preoccupation with Russian life and literature (especially poetry); and second, a fascination with brooding, even obsessive, relationships played out in lavish, sensuous detail inside a confined space ­ an art of flamboyant claustrophobia. Originally a poet (who still regards herself as one), then a children's author, she published her début novel as late as 1993: Zennor in Darkness, about the persecution of D H Lawrence in Cornwall during the Great War. Since then, the late starter has completed six novels in a mere eight years, and two books of short stories. A Spell of Winter won the inaugural Orange Prize in 1996, with its typically intense tale of a curdled sibling love. Before that, Burning Bright had mingled the urban perils of teenage prostitution with glimpses of the pristine beauty of the Finnish forests. Dunmore first witnessed the brief, spellbinding beauty of the Baltic summer when she taught English in Finland after university; it recurs, unforgettably, in the early sections of The Siege.

Her books emit a thundery air of menacing sensuality; of luscious, over-ripe food and turbid weather, with shifting alliances of family, lovers and friends bound together, far too close for comfort or safety. That atmosphere makes her one of the most distinctive voices in British fiction, yet as a writer she never slips into what she calls "an archetypal version of yourself". Mainstream novels, she adds, offer an exit from another sort of claustrophobic space: the poetry scene. "Writing a novel is a much more public thing. Readers engage very directly with novels. Once a novel exists, there's a ground that doesn't belong to either author or reader: a neutral territory."

Into the historical territory of The Siege, Dunmore has managed to smuggle her enduring passion for Russian verse. Her devotion began when the read Pushkin, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova and other giants, at Bristol University: "I love their work: the musicality of their language, their vibrancy, their political engagement, too ­ and yet their resolute independence of mind, purchased at a huge cost, very often."

While these Russian titans, read in the original, helped to shape her verse, their lines also chimed with her life. Dunmore has a late-teenage son and a seven-year-old daughter. Cue a verse from her beloved Marina Tsvetaeva: " 'All my life I have been leading a child by the hand.' That's something I relate to very strongly myself," she says. "It's true of my life as a writer. I've always had a small child to consider." As has Anna in The Siege, with her adored but troublesome Kolya. It's a novel that transposes all the everyday frets and joys of life into a supremely bleak and tragic key.

Until now, the best-known memorial in the West to this epic of death and resurrection has been a piece of music: Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony. After the Soviet victory in 1945, the reassertion of Stalinist terror meant that the city's ordeal dropped from view. "The thing at issue is always memory," argues Dunmore. "How do we define what happened? No monument in stone, however beautiful, can be relied on, because what was built with hands can be destroyed with hands. The living, vigilant memory is what you need." Her novel rekindles that flame. She recalls that, when she was growing up in Yorkshire, "Everybody's father and grandfathers had fought in wars. That was quite routine." Now, "It's all much more distant."

So, in the wake of first-hand testimony comes the Hollywood melodrama, with its endemic fibs and fantasies. Anyway, as she points out, "The Russians have not made epics for mass export, in the sense that the Americans have just made Pearl Harbor." Well, Pearl Harbor counts as a Second World War fiction that portrays some of the pivotal events of late 1941 ­ and so does The Siege. But you might just as well argue that the Millennium Dome is a bulky edifice built beside a river according to government diktat ­ and so is the Taj Mahal.

'The Siege' is published this week by Viking (£16.99)