28 September 2018

The Last Hundred Days, by Patrick McGuinness


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.