The Porcupine [Hardcover]

To the normal reader, this is a well-penned novel reflecting upon the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. To someone who knows Bulgaria, it is something else entirely. That Mr. Barnes who only travelled here on holiday can write such a detailed novel which portrays the Bulgarian people and psyche to a level that is unbelievable. The youngsters who scream at the TV, the grandmother who knows that socialism shall eventually prevail, the unsure prosecuter and the very sure ex-President are all Bulgarians that I know. Yes, he changed the names, but that is all. Bulgaria is a fascinating country going through a fascinating period in history. It is just a shame that it is left to an Englishman to write about her history. Thankfully, Barnes fulfills this duty admirally.

This seems to be one of Barnes' most overlooked works and it is really a pity. Although the novel is fairly short, it still manages to offer a brillant and nuanced account of the dilemmas which people have to face when they choose to discard a long-established way of living for a new system. Barnes has placed the story in a former communist state at the beginning of the 1990s, where the former leader of the state is about to be prosecuted for the crimes which he has committed during his reign. The new democratic leaders consider the trial to be a formality but as it progresses, the ostensibly clear-cut moral disinction between good and evil becomes blurred, and the truth is lost. Barnes manages to depict the trial from both sides of the fence and thus creates some very memorable characters whose interactions are highly interesting to observe because they represent a wide spectrum of ideas which are in tension with eachother. I especially like the charged confrontations between the prosectuor and the former head of state who represents new and old. This also makes it impossible for the reader to determine the moral and political dilemmas inherent in the story for his sympathies are taken on a rollercoaster-ride. Rather than seeing this as a muddle, one should see it as a way of comprehending these problems in a new light, and I certainly realised that I had shifted my sympathies during the reading. On a more general level, the story opens up for a probing of and quest for the concepts of "truth" and "authenticity", something which I believe is central to Barnes' work taken as a whole. In short, Barnes has created a fantastically vivid and varied account of the contempoary dismantling of communism in the east, and coupled it with more universally applicable musings.

Given that this small book's author is Julian Barnes, you would expect it to be beautifully written, perceptive, knowledgeable, very readable and sometimes quite amusing, and above all very very clever. It's all of that, but it is still a small book, and if I am supposed to assess it as a genuine novel and not just as a slightly overgrown article for, say, Punch or the New Yorker I am not prepared to give it a higher rating when the author makes things as easy for himself as Barnes does here.

Barnes's much-lauded Flaubert's Parrot struck me in much the same way. Both books consist largely of ready-made material. Nothing wrong with that per se, I suppose, and I would not mind if I thought that this work amounted to anything I could, with a straight face, call a historical novel, but I can't. What the narrative here does is to weave a bit of embroidery round the story of Todor Zhivkov, the long-time dictator of Bulgaria in its communist days, and his 1987 downfall in the tsunami of perestroika unleashed by Gorbachev, which of course undermined all the satellite regimes and finally spelled the end of the mighty Soviet Union itself. The scenario is a make-believe trial of the thinly disguised Zhivkov, seen partly through his eyes but more from the perspective of the imaginary (I suppose) prosecutor. One thing that is very accomplished in the way it is handled is Barnes's ability to make both of these figures genuine human characters and at the same time mouthpieces for ideologies. Even `ideologies' does not convey the whole truth: this is a study in mentalities, in the mindsets that find their expression in the ideological convictions. These can be generalised of course, indeed they have to be, but in the last resort the holder of any idea is an individual distinct from every other individual. Not every novelist could convey this sense of layers within layers inside human personalities, but not every novelist is as clever as Julian Barnes.

At my own level of comprehension it reads very convincingly, but of course like everyone brought up in the democratic west I carry with me a picture of such regimes influenced by my own side's official version. I shall not go so far as to join with the critics who find it all realistic because I lack the depth of background to make such a judgment and I sincerely hope that they do not, otherwise they should not make any claim of this kind. The detail is beautiful - the communist lingo through which language served not as a vehicle for thought but as a substitute for thought, the conflicting motivations of the prosecutor, the discovery (if it needs discovery) that all truth and virtue is not on one side rather than the other, above all the totally impenetrable and sclerotic faith possessed by the ex-dictator, a thing impervious to reason but still able to use language and argument as a powerful weapon. It all held my attention to the last of its few pages - with the exception of three or four pages of blatant padding.

The former dictator uses, or abuses, a lot of the court's time with an interminable recitation of awards, decorations and whatnot that he has been invested with by the nations of the world. This is skim-reading material if ever I saw skim-reading material. If you like Paradise Lost you may recall the objection raised by T S Eliot to a roll-call of place-names in book XI

...Cambalu seat of Cathaian Can
And Samarkand by Oxus Temir's throne... [etc]

Eliot accuses poor old Milton of not taking things seriously enough and just indulging himself. I think that is far too strict. The passage in question is only 20 lines or so, whereas Barnes churns out something like 4 pages of his ridiculous decorations, and I feel he is taking his readers for mugs. It made me think hard about how I ought to rate this book, after everything it has going for it. It is just a bit too facile in just too many ways, so three stars will do.