Emily Rhodes

A modern Medea: Iron Curtain, by Vesna Goldsworthy, reviewed

A novel of love and betrayal artfully evokes the 1980s while also drawing on the mythic past

‘Medea’ by Frederick Sandys — the mythical character whom Vesna Goldsworthy’s protagonist resembles. [Getty Images]

Vesna Goldsworthy’s finely wrought third novel explodes into life early on with a shocking scene in which Misha — the boyfriend of our protagonist, Milena Urbanska — returns from a short, tough spell of military service, initiates a game of Russian roulette (‘the only Russian thing I could face right now’) and blows his brains out.

It is 1981. Misha and Milena are children of the political elite in an unnamed capital city in the Eastern Bloc. As such, they are afforded privileges their compatriots lack: palatial homes, preferential treatment, western luxuries as seemingly innocuous as cans of Bitter Lemon from Italy and imported tampons, instead of ‘the scratchy home-produced sausages of grey cotton waste encased in a flimsy net that… soaked through before you could say “period”’.

These are evidently insufficient compensations, however, for additional surveillance and pressure to toe the party line. After Misha’s tragic exit, Milena buries herself in translation work for the country’s maize production until she’s asked to translate at a poetry festival, where she meets Jason Connor, a handsome Irish poet. She lends him her father’s coat; a few days later they have sex on her father’s bed. Jason asks her to return to London with him, but Milena stays behind, endures an abortion, then follows him several months later.

Appropriately enough, Iron Curtain is split in two halves, the first set in the East, the second in London. The initial fascination of witnessing life behind the Curtain is matched by seeing 1980s England from an outsider’s perspective. When Jason smuggles Milena into his spartan hall of residence, with its ‘coffin-sized’ bed, she says: ‘The enormity of the move I had made was somehow brought home by the smallness of the room.’

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