The difficult thing is to measure the extent to which her Ukrainian fantasy was opportunist or compulsive, cynical or naive. Hoaxes are like those old black and white films where a bolt of lightning illuminates for a split second the murderer in the upstairs bedroom with the knife raised above his head. The weird light they cast allows us to glimpse the cultural weather that let them happen. They're like a polaroid of the period. But for those who get too near the centre of the storm the cost can be very high.
Hoaxes are juggernauts.
And hoaxes depend on excess, on a principle of disproportionate enthusiasm. I can remember Peter Porter once saying to me that we have to overvalue the writing of our time, because no one else is going to. A hoax snap-freezes the flavour of that overvaluation. Demidenko is a fluent, accessible writer. But we all have to live with the fact that a nerveless novel written in the dead phrases of airport fiction, peopled with stereotypes who talk in teledrama dialogue, has taken three major literary awards.