The Last Hundred Days [Paperback]

The Last Hundred Days is a straightforward, first person narrative told by an English academic who has found himself teaching at a Bucharest university in late 1989. He arrives into a totalitarian communist state led by the sinister Nicolae Ceau'sescu supported by the army, militia, police and securitate. But as the reader knows, in 100 days time, the regime will fall and the Ceau'sescus will be shot. This makes for an odd novel - the end is known and the puzzle is how such a turnaround will happen so quickly.

Much of the madness of 1980s Romania is well known. The destruction of villages; the orphanages; the construction of the Palace of the People; and the systematic starvation of the population in order to repay foreign debt. These reference points are all there. But there is more: an insight into the nature of corruption; how the nomenklature lived; the crazy relations between the Conduca'tor and his various African and East European counterparts, perpetually receiving each other on official visits in an effort to create credibility from thin air. As the unrest grows, the bould Nicolae jets off to Iran to press the flesh. And when you're trying to impress with your Iranian connections, you know you're in trouble.

And in the middle of all this, there's the story. Our unnamed narrator flies into Bucharest to take on a job he was given despite not attending the interview. He arrives to find he has filled the shoes (and the job, and the flat) of the missing Belanger. His position, overseen by sleazy Leo O'Heix, seems to involve more than merely teaching students. Our narrator is inducted into a world of intrigue which leads to intimate connections with all levels of the Romanian communist party. A complicated and tangled plot unfolds, which presages the coming revolution in various ways.

The invocation of Bucharest is convincing and arresting. The sleaze is convincing too. The party games and machinations ring true. But something doesn't quite click. The novel is too long and feels repetitive. Once we've had a motorcade we don't really need another one. Once we've got the idea that districts of Bucharest are being demolished, we don't need to go there again. And for all the intrigue of the plot, it generates a feeling of "so what". The novel does the revolution well; it fills in background and brings it to life. Crucially, it shows the revolution as having had a before when all we have seen from the news reports was the after. But the story feels like a bit of a bolt on to justify the historical aspect.

The Last Hundred Days isn't a bad book - and some of the turns of phrase are really quite brilliant; some of the observations are really very funny. It just doesn't quite cohere enough to be a great book.

By 1989 Nicolae Ceausescu had been the communist ruler of Romania for twenty-four years. This was to be his last year. Focusing on Ceausescu's last hundred days, author Patrick McGuinness recreates all the forces leading to the overthrow of the government, telling his story through the eyes of an unnamed twenty-one-year-old speaker from the UK. To escape terribly memories at home, the young man applied for a foreign posting and was given a job teaching English in Bucharest, a job for which he had neither applied nor appeared for an interview.

In Bucharest his mentor, Leo O'Heix, shows him "the Paris of the East," which now more clearly resembles "a deserted funfair." The elegant Capsa Hotel, where the waiters have been trained in French manners, serves Chateaubriand "while in the shops beyond, unstacked shelves gleamed under twists of flypaper and the crimeless streets shouldered their burden of emptiness." At Capsa, the party faithful and the moneyed come to make connections, negotiate personal deals, and enjoy food not available anywhere else. "It's all here, passion, intimacy, human fellowship," Leo tells him. "You just need to adapt to the circumstances...it's a bit of a grey area to be honest. Actually...it's all grey area round here," but this is "the Romanian way," the speaker learns, and it is adapt or get out. Leo has adapted to Romanian life completely - he is Bucharest's biggest black-marketeer.

Gradually, Bucharest comes to life (and death) through the speaker's eyes. The city is being bulldozed at a rapid rate, and the old architectural monuments and historical buildings are being replaced with cheap, modern buildings. Shop signs appear on new buildings, but the shops are empty. Hungry people wait for hours in long lines, only to discover that it has run out. Even the headstones have disappeared from cemeteries, removed by the government for use in building the People's Palace, a colossal monument begun in 1983 and second in size only to the U.S. Pentagon. The "velvet revolution" has started everywhere except Romania - East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and even Russia - yet Ceausescu remains in power here.

The author does a remarkable job of recreating Bucharest, which is really the main character here, a place with incredible resilience, around which all the human characters revolve as the author connects them with the city's history, its communist functionaries, its "flexible" morality, and its often inflexible laws and dictates. The speaker finds himself growing up as he makes choices or has them made for him, and he eventually adapts to being followed. No one is who s/he seems to be, and the tension rises as the speaker and his friends find themselves in increasingly fraught circumstances. The reader, familiar with the characters, comes to know and expect them to act in particular ways, but often discovers at the last minute betrayals have occurred. The author is particularly realistic in making no real value judgments about most of these characters, even those who may act "unethically." In times of such crisis, who knows what any of us would do, he seems to suggest. Subtle, often humorous, and profoundly ironic, this is a unique approach to a study of a city in the midst of evolution and then revolution and its aftermath, and none of the characters here will remain unchanged. Fascinating on all levels.

"The Last Hundred Days" in question here are the final days of Ceau'escu's Romania in late 1989. Narrated by an unnamed young British expat who has a job offer from the English department of Bucharest University, despite never having interviewed for the job, we get an insight into the life under communist rule as Eastern bloc countries all around start to open up after the fall of the Berlin Wall. We are told that McGuinness lived in Romania in the years leading up to the revolution, and this is no surprise as there is an authenticity here that could only have come from some level of inside knowledge.

It's a fascinating insight, and one which I enjoyed very much, although there are a few qualms that are worth pointing out. For a start McGuinness takes quite a while for the story to get going. This is his first novel and he is apparently also a poet and this comes as no surprise in the first 50 or so pages as he never misses an opportunity to provide a metaphor or simile in his descriptions that can lead to the book seeming a little "over-written".

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 in 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 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 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 Ceau'escu'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.

It's a difficult book to categorise. It is fiction, but it feels like non-fiction. It has spy elements, but it isn't a conventional spy plot of good versus evil. It is often satirical and funny, but the situation is far from that. After a slow beginning, I was hooked.