In the land of doublespeak

An Oxford don and poet, Patrick McGuinness lived in Bucharest in 1989, and in this fictionalised account of the regime’s death throes he puts his first-hand experience to compelling use.

An Oxford don and poet, Patrick McGuinness lived in Bucharest in 1989, and in this fictionalised account of the regime’s death throes he puts his first-hand experience to compelling use. So compelling, in fact, that at times one feels he can’t bear to leave anything out, and the plot is accordingly tweaked. But even if there’s the odd creak, this first and Booker-longlisted novel is a wonderfully good read, giving one a convincing taste of how it might be to live under the most surreal kind of communist rule.

Ceausescu’s Romania was the land of doublespeak. The story opens when the unnamed narrator, an English student, takes a job at Bucharest’s university on the basis of an interview that never took place.  Bewildered, he is shown the ropes by his colleague Leo, who supplies so many party officials with smuggled luxury goods that he can afford to be outspoken. Leo becomes our student’s Mephistopheles-like guide.

The city has a visceral presence, clotted as it is with cranes, dust, diggers, unfinished and hastily erected new buildings (Ceausescu’s ‘modernisation’ project). When the university secretary miscarries, Leo and our narrator frantically look for her, but the hospital she’s in is too new to be on the map. They do find her. This people’s hospital resembles an abbatoir, with trails of blood along the sign-free corridors (party officials go to a hi-tech medical clinic with frosted glass windows).  

It’s a divided dystopia. Shop items are displayed on concrete slabs —  a few green peppers ‘like withered old socks’, some gnarled carrots; officials — and of course Leo — go to Capsia, where there’s blackmarket champagne.