The Last Hundred Days Patrick McGuinness

The Last Hundred Days Patrick McGuinness

Overview:

Within weeks of publication, Patrick McGuinness's debut novel found itself on the Man Booker long-list, and deservedly so. Set in Bucharest in 1989, it reawakens that state of stunned disbelief as successive Soviet bloc countries underwent bloodless revolutions, until there was only Romania at the end of the queue, making a bloody hash of it.

The novel describes the oppression and deprivation of the Romanian people in the build-up to that coup, and paints a sordid picture of the corruption of their rulers.

It feels oddly contemporary, especially in the way that a grasping elite escape the consequences of their actions and rise above the chaos. Not that the Ceausescus themselves did, of course: their messy trial and execution provides a resonant coda.

The opening chapter is superb: its discourse on the state of boredom offers a kind of conceptual counterpoint to an unfurling narrative, with its cast of impressively drawn characters, that is almost Tolstoyan in scope. "In the West we've always thought of boredom as slack time, life's lift music sliding off the ear. Totalitarian boredom is different. It's a state of expectation already heavy with its own disappointment."

McGuinness is an accomplished poet and writes with superb clarity. The novel is littered with aperçus that have the reader reaching for a pencil. Here is Bucharest: "a heat-beaten brutalist maze whose walls and towers melted like sugar". And here is the unctuous consular attaché Wintersmith (straight out of Greene-land) and the British expat community, "where largely identical people fuck each other interchangeably". Here is the Boulevard of Socialist Victory: "a vast avenue that didn't so much vanish into the distance as use it up, drawing everything around into itself." And here is the grim Stoicu, interior minister, with the "eyes of a man who sought in those around him the lowest motivation and always found it."



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Sincerelyours

And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!