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The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness (view source)
Revision as of 15:42, 2 September 2011
, 15:42, 2 September 2011no edit summary
|reviewer=Robin Leggett
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Looking at the final days of Ceausescu's Romania, this first person narrative is one part [[:Category:John Le le Carre|Le Carré]], one part [[:Category:Bill Bryson|Bill Bryson]] and one part an account of everyday life under Ceausescu's bizarre Stalinist world. It feels very realistic and at times you will forget that this is a work of fiction. There are also plenty of wry and satirical moments to lighten this account of a sinister regime where everyone is watching someone.
|rating=4.5
|buy=Yes
However the biggest challenge is that the book has a fairly tenuous relationship to anything that would conventionally be called a plot. The narrator's experience has moments that might be considered to be a plot-line as he finds out what is happening to friends he meets, but the driver of the action is the historic events. This is a problem as we all know what happened and in fact while there were signs of some changes during the last one hundred days, when the end came it was all rather sudden. Neither does our narrator seem to have much to do in his job - he meets some students outside the university and frankly it is difficult to see how he knew who they were. You might also argue that a junior, expat teacher wouldn't have access to the relatively senior members of the regime that this book suggests.
Yet for all this, it doesn't read like a work of fiction. It reads more like a cocktail of one part [[:Category:John Le le Carre|Le Carré]], one part one of those accounts by British journalists of the last days of a regime and, what makes this so readable, one part [[:Category:Bill Bryson|Bill Bryson]] at his light hearted best at pointing out the ridiculousness of situations. The Bryson element is provided by the narrator's expat friend, Leo, another teacher in the department who has all the best lines. Leo is involved in the black market and has enough detachment to comment on things but enough inside information to know what's going on.
McGuinness portrays very well the danger and corruption of the regime and what it is like when everyone is watching everyone else and no one can be trusted. We see a mixture of dissidents, party apparatchiks, spies and ordinary people struggling to protect their own interests under Ceausescu's crazy world. Of course, like any good Eastern bloc story, we also get the 'man from the ministry', here in the form of a fairly ineffective British diplomat who is also struggling to make sense of what is happening.