| Against Totalitarianism, With Wit and Verve |
January 19, 2011
Michael Frayn's The Russian Interpreter is a novel set in Moscow in the early 1960s. Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago has been successfully smuggled out to the West and published to great acclaim. But back in Moscow, it's totalitarianism as usual, complete with thought-police, black market shenanigans, Eastern endurance, and Western bumbling. At turns horrifying and hysterical (as in very, very funny), Frayn manages to capture both the Russian temperament of wry survival and the English one of unflappability; an unflappability suddenly sent flapping by a turn of events no Englishman could anticipate (but every Muscovite understands).
Paul Manning is an unassuming English researcher working away on his boring thesis at Moscow University. Collared by Gordon Proctor-Gould, an old schoolmate (whom he cannot remember from Adam), he is asked to serve as an interpreter for Proctor-Gould's enterprising goal of fostering communication between east and west (the irony will only become more manifest as the novel continues). Manning quickly becomes an interpreter for a more (amore) amorous goal of wooing a Russian blond with no English skills to speak of but whose skills at surviving -- and thriving -- have been finely honed under the Soviet regime. Further peopled by a cast of characters out of an early Mel Brooks movie, the game of life as played under the Soviets is captured with both wit and accuracy, making this book a profoundly moving -- and yet still very funny -- portrait of the reality of totalitarianism. Whereas the visitors to such a regime may come out relatively unscathed, those who cannot leave bear the brunt of the repression -- and when they hold a spirit of resistance against all the odds out to grind them down, they are heroes, of their world and ours.
Fifty years later, the Berlin Wall is long gone, and yet such totalitarianism still exists, most evident in the country of Belarus where a regime in the Soviet tradition flourishes. Lukashenko rules with an iron fist, using his police force, still called the KGB, and the tactics of silencing opposition, driving out dissent, and killing off political challengers to run the country as he sees fit. But there are heroes fighting the old-style Soviet tactics of mind and body control in Belarus, as recently demonstrated by the players of the Belarus Free Theater who escaped the manacles of Lukashenko to travel west and perform their stunning production of Being Harold Pinter at the Under The Radar festival sponsored by New York City's Public Theater and at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. Being Harold Pinter is a disturbing mix of Pinter's plays and the actual words of political prisoners held and tortured in Belarus. For more information on the situation in Belarus, the role of the Belarus Free Theater in working against repression, and what you can do, visit http://zoneofsilence.org/
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March 10, 2009
Michael Frayn's Toward the End of the Morning is a send-up of journalists and their columns, copies, local interest bits, and endless demands for crossword puzzles. The novel is mildly funny but terribly dated. Released in 1967 it reads as a history of well-educated, middle class London and its efforts at gentrification, integration, journalization, and fornication. No internet was yet in sight and no one seemed to work too hard for the late-breaking news; sex was discreet but assumed; lunch was taken every day with the same gang at the same cafe, always with one beer too many; and the days' work always ended at the same cafe for a pint of bitters or glass of whiskey before heading home.
I am sure when this novel came out it was riotously funny. It is still entertaining, with engaging characters, like the knee-nibbling neighbor and the poor guy who gets nibbled and himself nibbles sugar with a spoon and wonders why he's getting chubby. The characters, disheveled and out of sorts and hankering for something if only they could figure out what, never make a move except when shoved by someone else. Sometimes the shove is hard, sometimes gentle, and change does come -- movement overcoming conflict, important to a novel -- but it is not the change that any one of them really wants.
I read another office-disaster type novel, Pulpy and Midge, set in modern Canada. The sex in that novel is more overt than in Towards the End of Morning but no more frequent, the drinking as ample, and the accomplishments of the office as minor. What is most different from office life in the 1960s is that the pace of modern life is much faster, more frenetic. A cliche but true: our present office space suffers from a frenzied speeding up of time. Is this due to fax, email, internet, blackberry, iPhone, etc? It is another cliche but just as true, that the inventions meant to free us tie us more firmly to the ever-speedier treadmill of work. And while in a 1960s office, time was wasted by staring out the window at the passers-by below, today we turn to our Facebook page, and ignore the real life outside altogether.
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