Eastern Promise

It is autumn 1975 and I'm listening to the Top 20. Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody is No.1 and as the final piano chord fades away, a strange motif for brass can be heard repeating itself in the background: D-D-Eb-D-C-A-Bb-G. The following week, I notice it again.

A few years later I discover that the tune is the call sign of Radio Tiranë, which shares the same frequency (247m medium wave) with BBC Radio 1.

I begin listening to Radio Tiranë and become fascinated by the strange rhetorical language, with words like proletariat, co-optivist, imperialist, presidium and enigmatic phrases like people's intellectual. Albania, I learn, is a communist country.

I start tuning in to radio stations in other communist countries, particularly Moscow and Prague. They are keen to tell me how wonderful their political systems are, but do it in such a mind-numbingly dull and humourless way, I find it hard to believe their claims. The announcers sound like robots and the stories are implausibly utopian, even to the ears of a schoolboy.

It is the beginning of an slight obsession with communist Eastern Europe that has remained with me ever since.

In 1988 I visit communist Czechslovakia and find that life there is even grimmer than expected. Shops are half empty, people are afraid to be seen talking to me and, more importantly, there only seems to be one flavour of ice cream. I plan to return to the Eastern Bloc as soon as possible, but a year later the Berlin Wall comes down. I'm very pleased, but also selfishly disappointed that an opportunity has been lost.

However I was wrong about lost opportunities. I have probably learned and understood far more about the Warsaw Pact countries since the Berlin Wall fell, thanks to a succession of excellent memoirs, films and documentaries.

Stasiland is probably the most successful book on the subject, in English at least, but I have just finished another memoir which I have enjoyed almost as much - the superb Red Love.

There is something particularly interesting about East Germany. It isn't just the fact that country existed in opposition to another Germany, with a figurative divide that became a literal one, but also that many of its citizens were committed in a way that the Czech, Poles and Hunagrians never really were.

After the Second World War, Germans were faced with two choices: amnesia or atonement. It could be argued that West Germany chose the former, while the East attempted to build a utopian society that would act as a historical counterweight to Naziism. The ruling elite of East Germany was dominated by long-standing communists, many of whom had either fled to Moscow in the 1930s or been imprisoned by the Nazis. They were committed.

As for the ordinary people in the Oosten, they were used to goose-stepping soldiers and fatuous slogans. If the new rulers could put food on the table and provide jobs, that would be enough for most.

Red Love could have simply been a well-written memoir of growing up in 1980s East Germany, but Maxim Leo wisely takes a back seat and concentrates on the remarkable stories of his grandfathers. One grandfather was a German Jewish communist who fought with the French resistance. The other was a committed Nazi who became an equally committed Stalinist. They both became nation builders in the new Germany.

Leo's parents were also committted to the ideals behind the German Democratic Republic, but had a more ambivalent attitude because they were not saddled with the emotional and political baggage of the 1930s and 40s. A Stasi file described Leo's father as "critical but sympathetic." Neither parent wanted to escape to the West.

As for Leo, like many of his peers, he felt completely disillutioned with life in East Germany. He had no respect for the elderly elite whose social experiment had clearly failed. Older generations were prepared to endure a lower standard of living, either because they believed or were too afraid. The young had nothing to lose and once Glasnost appeared, the edifice crumbled.

Reading Red Love today, I'm impressed by the bizarreness of a country where individuals are routinely designated enemies of the people, for the most spurious of reasons. How could a regime survive for so long? The Soviet tanks probably helped to focus people's minds, but there were also enough citizens who were prepared to spy on their neighbours. It was a country built on paranoia.

Thank God those days have gone. But there are still echoes of the East, whether it's a journalist being arrested in Putin's Russia, or a corporate conference in which a managing director's banal slogans are being applauded by an audience of anxious sycophants. The fight continues.

Finally, here are some photos from the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. Happy days:

I hope you'll enjoy Red Love too. If you don't, your name will be added to a file. Expect a visit from one of my collegues. Possibly Gunther.

The Post-Operative Paradise

Apart from inadvertently growing a beard, I have achieved very little this week. I'm not sure how long it takes to recover from surgery, but I'm in no hurry to return to work. I can't say I miss being surrounded by malevolent bulls and surly, limbless farm workers. Also, I think I'm temperamentally suited to indolence.

But does reading count as indolence? I'm not sure. Particularly when the authors include Paul Theroux, Michael Blakemore and John Williams. As this is supposed to be a literary blog, I thought I'd recommend the best books I've read recently:

Paul Theroux - The Last Train to Zona Verde

"A tourist doesn't know where they've been. A traveller doesn't know where they're going."

Many things have been said about Paul Theroux: he is not a travel writer, but a writer who travels; he regards himself as a novelist, but the reading public don't buy his fiction; he hasn't written anything decent for 30 years; he is pompous, self-important, cynical and grumpy; even his brother doesn't like him...

I could go on - everyone seems to have an opinion on the author. But who is Paul Theroux? Even he doesn't seem to be quite sure and wrote two novels - My Secret History and My Other Life - which narrate the alternate histories of a character called Paul Theroux.

However, I liked the Paul Theroux that I met in The Last Train to Zona Verde. Written ten years after his African travel memoir, Dark Star Safari, Theroux is now in his 70s and realises that he is making his last journey on the continent. He has loved Africa since he taught there in the 1960s, but is depressed by the growing corruption and squalor that surrounds him. He asks himself the question that all travellers ask at some point: What am I doing here?

"Suffering has no value, but you have to suffer in order to know that. I never found it easy to travel, yet the difficulty in it made it satisfying because it seemed in a way to resemble the act of writing - a groping in the dark, wandering into the unknown, coming to understand the condition of strangeness."

In a Daily Telegraph review, Kevin Telfer criticises Theroux for writing a book that "feels more like a description of Theroux's inner state than what is around him." This not only seems to be rather missing the point of good travel writing, but is also woefully inaccurate, as one of the strengths of The Last Train to Zona Verde is its vivid accounts of the landscape and people.

If Theroux is 'grumpy' about sub-Saharan Africa, it is because he is comparing the present day reality of the continent with the idealism of the 1960s:

"We have bestowed on Africa just enough of the disposable junk of the modern world to create in African cities a junkyard replica of the West, a mirror image of our own failures. Such places are transit camps filled with people who have been abandoned by their fattened and corrupt governments."

But this is not a relentlessly gloomy book. Time and time again, we meet people who rise above the limitations of their backgrounds to triumph against the odds and Theroux is as keen to tell the stories of others as he is to ask himself what a 70-year-old man is doing on a journey that might end in death.

I enjoyed this armchair journey to somewhere I never intend to visit and would recommend it without reservation.


Michael Blakemore - Stage Blood

The mark of a really good book is one that makes you care about a subject you've never been interested in. In spite of having in-laws who worked in the theatre, I'm woefully ignorant about the subject and wouldn't have chosen to read this book if it hadn't been for this brilliant review by Simon Callow.

Whether you're interested in the early years of the National Theatre or not, Stage Blood is a gripping read in which the octogenrian Michael Blakemore settles an ancient score with Sir Peter Hall. In the hands of a lesser writer, it could have been an unedifying read by an embittered old man, but this memoir sparkles with generosity and wit.

Blakemore's portraits of figures like Olivier and Tynan are immensely entertaining, as is his description of Anthony Hopkins' disastrous, alcohol-fuelled performance of Macbeth. But it is the growing tension with Sir Peter, culminating in a terrible showdown, which rises Stage Blood above the level of an ordinary memoir and gives the reader a vicarious, visceral thrill.


John Williams - Stoner

When you read a book that has been universally praised and selected as every other person's book of the year, it is hard not to feel a certain resistance. How could any novel possibly live up to this amount of hype?

But Stoner did.


Alexander Lernet-Holenia - I Was Jack Mortimer

One of the best small publishers around is Pushkin Press, who specialise in discovering and translating lost classics, particularly European ones. I discovered them ten years ago, when I read Antal Szerb's wonderful Journey By Moonlight (originally published in Hungarian) and managed to get the book included in an 'Undiscovered Classics' promotion that I organised, across 130 branches of Ottakar's.


I Was Jack Mortimer is an short Austrian novel, published in 1930, that reads like that bastard offspring of Franz Kafka and Raymond Chandler. It also reminded me of Antal Szerb and Jiri Weil, with its highly developed sense of the absurd.

The plot is simple enough: a taxi driver picks up a passenger at a station and is asked to drive to the Bristol Hotel. After a few minutes, the driver asks the passenger to clarify whether he wants the Old Bristol or the New Bristol. There is no reply. He repeats his question and is once again met with silence. When he is finally able to turn  round, the driver is horrified to see that his passenger has been killed. But how?

What follows is an enjoyably absurd story that vividly evokes the spirit of Middle Europe between the wars. It only takes a couple of hours to read, so I'd recommend it for a journey.


I've also enjoyed Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? - a great comfort read, full of wit and insight. I'd always regarded Trollope as a bit of an old windbag until I took the plunge a few years ago and read He Knew He Was Right.

Perhaps I'm just getting old, but I find Trollope's novels increasingly appealing.

Finally, I'd also recommend Max Hastings' book Bomber Command - another book about a subject I knew relatively little about. I had no idea that at the beginning of the War, British bombing was woefully inaccurate, with navigation equipment so rudimentary, that pilots were often miles from their targets.

Occasionally, if a magnetic storm affected their compasses, they even flew in the wrong direction and one pilot - a man named Warren - unwittingly bombed an English city (from then on, his colleagues called him Baron von Warren).

Although Max Hastings tries to be even-handed, it is clear that he doesn't have much time for 'Bomber' Harris, whose obsession with destroying every city in Germany allegedly clouded his military judgement and resulted in the unnecessary loss of life of both airmen and civillians.

If I had to recommend just one book, then it would have to be Stoner, but you've probably already read it.

At some point my wife will stop waiting on me hand and foot and I'll have to resume selling books, but in the meantime, I'm going to enjoy every moment.

Finally, this has nothing to do with books, but I watched The Happiest Days of Your Life with my mother the other day and thought that this scene alone made the whole film worthwhile: