Patrick
McGuinness’s first novel The Last Hundred
Days, published in 2011, was
shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and made it onto the Man Booker
longlist. Its unnamed English narrator
arrives in Bucharest in 1989, at the tail end of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime,
and becomes an eyewitness to history.
Despite not having turned up to the job interview in England and having
dropped out of higher education without obtaining a degree, he has been offered
a job teaching at a university in Bucharest.
His
unlovely parents dead and with no ties, he heads off to a country socially and
ideologically entirely unlike his own, though the fat cats do well under both
systems, and a shameless trickle-down system of corruption thrives in Romania
(he is unembarrassedly ripped off at the airport by customs officers who
pillage his belongings in front of him with the laconic explanation
‘tax’). He is assigned the flat of his
academic predecessor, the mysterious Dr (or rather ‘Dr’) Belanger, who has left
all his possessions, even his clothes, behind.
Belanger, off screen for nearly the whole book, casts a long shadow over
the narrator’s life. The unorthodox job
offer may seem an implausible beginning to the novel, but in the surreal world
of 1989 Bucharest it comes to feel unremarkable.
The
narrator falls in with another expat Briton, Leo O'Heix, also a lecturer at the
university, who had wangled him the job apparently on the grounds he would be
easily manipulated. A bogus degree
certificate is provided for the newcomer so he is good to go as a lecturer (a
doctorate costs extra, an investment Belanger presumably made). The new boy has no qualms about accepting
fraudulent academic credentials, nor, as soon as he arrives at work, in
acceding to a ‘request’ from the head of department to provide a reference to
study abroad for a student he has never met.
He is compromised morally from the start, but then compromise underpins
daily life in Bucharest. You do wonder
about the state of Romanian education at that time if someone without a degree
could just stroll in and start teaching, but on this evidence not much teaching
was going on anyway.
Leo
is in fact the star of the novel around whom much of the action revolves. He devotes little time to his day job,
instead dabbling in the black market, as cynical about daily life in Bucharest
as everybody else. On top of his other
activities, legitimate but mostly otherwise, he is writing a book: initially
commissioned to produce a guidebook to Bucharest, its sturdy old buildings are
being torn down so quickly and replaced by shoddy blocks that he cannot keep
up, and like some crazed Walter Benjamin he engages in a futile
psychogeographic race to record Bucharest in his The City of Lost Walks even as it disappears around him. At the same time he tries to save what he can
from destruction, part of a network spiriting artefacts away from the bulldozers. A church’s rood screen may end up in a
minister’s flat, but at least it is preserved.
Even
the best of us can have mixed motives, and Leo is no exception. Despite his boorish, frequently self-serving,
ways Leo has a sincere affection for his adopted city. He is scornful of Romanian politics, but
equally scornful of the British diplomatic corps which turns a blind eye to the
regime’s dark side in the name of good relations and business opportunities,
trying to insulate itself by recreating a small slice of home (down to a pub)
yet not immune to the corruption infecting the rest of the population.
On
the surface the regime seems stable despite shortages and general ossification,
but there are murmurings across Eastern Europe as communist governments lose
their grip on power. Through Leo, the
narrator comes into contact with a wide cross-section of Bucharest life. He has a brief relationship with the daughter
of a senior party official, but a more fulfilling one with a doctor at the
local hospital. At one point he is
briefly involved in a people-smuggling ring trying to help individuals reach
the west, an expedition ending in tragedy.
Then he meets Sergiu Trofim, a once senior figure who had known
Ceaușescu and Stalin but is now on the social periphery, and agrees to help
Sergiu write his memoirs – or rather real memoirs dishing the dirt, rather than
the sanitised party-approved version he is being obliged to produce, the unexpurgated
typescript to be smuggled out and published in Paris.
In
these various interactions the narrator quickly finds people are not always
what they seem, trust is a precious commodity, and life can be disconcertingly
arbitrary. Through his eyes we are given
a convincing overview of what living in a repressive society does to the
psyche. McGuinness draws out the
soul-sapping ossification and apathy of daily life, showing that routinisation
kills the spirit more effectively than naked repression. Propaganda everybody sees through is pumped
out; nobody believes the statistics but everybody goes along with the deception
because it is the only way to survive.
The prevailing mood is one of ennui, or ‘totalitarian boredom’. You never know who might inform on you, so
the best policy is self-surveillance. In
such ways one becomes inured to the discomforts and paranoia, even finding
comfort in surveillance, thereby internalising the state’s repression
(something Orwell had put his finger on).
For
much of the novel the focus is on the narrator, Leo and their circle. Only in the final third does it shift to the wider
political currents, an edifice crumbling like the jerry-built buildings
infesting the capital. The reader brings
historical knowledge of the outcome, but from the inside the slow yet
accelerating slide to the fall is initially so imperceptible it barely
registers. Despite the book covering the
last few months of the Ceaușescu government, for most of that period it must
have felt secure despite the injustices and economic stagnation.
The
reader knows how it is going to end, and an air of inevitability hangs over the
progress towards Christmas Day. It is
part of McGuinness’s skill that he can elicit sympathy for the way the deposed
dictators (for it was a joint enterprise with Elena Ceaușescu, and she bore
most responsibility for the bloodshed in the final days when Nicolae was in
Iran) were treated and summarily executed without due process, rather than glee
at them having received their just deserts.
However,
will the new politicians be any better than the old ones, leaving aside that
many of the old ones have retained their hold on power? As Leo ruefully notes, ‘new brothel, same old
whores….’ Neither Leo nor the narrator
has anything to go back to England for, and despite having their visas revoked
by the defunct regime, the novel ends with them in Bucharest, looking forward
to the future, however things pan out.
For all its faults, there was something about the place which would not
let them go, and now it was not the Securitate.
We
are never sure how much of this is autobiographical – the narrator certainly
seems to rub shoulders with powerful and influential people in ways that seem far-fetched
in an Englishman newly arrived – but the observations of Bucharest feel
authentic. McGuinness was in the country
at the time, and as he was born in 1968 he was the same age roughly as the
protagonist. It is difficult, however,
to believe there is much autobiography in the novel, apart from eyewitness
descriptions of living conditions and the events leading up to the fall of
Ceaușescu.
There
is a tension between the realistic depiction of Romanian life and the
implausibility of the acceptance of the narrator into these social structures
in a society which McGuinness emphasises was deeply paranoid. For all his protestations that he is being
pushed to the margins, the narrator seems to find himself, thanks to Leo, in
the thick of things with no effort, whereas in practice he would have been
frozen out. He even manages an unlikely,
albeit brief, relationship with a party princess, putting him in touch with her
father who happens to be the deputy interior minister, despite possessing
little to commend him to her; and this while she is still in love with his
predecessor, the aforementioned Belanger, a gangster who had been living in exile
in Belgrade but who returns to take advantage of opportunities opening up in post-Ceaușescu Romania.
In
such ways the narrator, in a very short time, smoothly manages the transition
from foreigner to insider. In a
conspiratorial society, the fewer the conspirators the better, for reasons of
personal safety, and I could not see in whose interest it was to have him
around. In real life he would doubtless
have been on a plane back to England within a month, having annoyed everybody
and been useless at his job, but unlike Leo having no leverage with which to
retain it. Most probably, even though he
has been in the city several years, Leo would have fared little better in terms
of access to influential individuals, however many bribes he offered. These outsiders are effectively ciphers for
McGuinness’s exploration of the dying regime, but ring false.
