Something New

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books. 

“PRAGUE IN MY BONES – A Memoir” by Jindra Tichy (Quentin Wilson Publishing, $NZ45); “SHOULD WE STAY OR SHOULD WE GO” by Lionel Shriver (The Borough Press – distrbuted by Harper-Collins Press, $NZ32:99)

 

            I wish I could like Jindra Tichy’s Prague in My Bones much more than I do. As this memoir makes clear to us, Jindra Tichy is a formidably intelligent woman  who has had to endure much in her life, but who has managed to keep a sane and temperate view of things. Prague in My Bones condemns much, but nowhere does it succumb to self-pity. The net effect is of serenity won after storm.

            A Czech born in 1937, Jindra as a young child lived through the five brutal years of Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Liberation from this was brief. The coup of 1948 condemned the country to forty years of Communist rule which, in its early years with purges and show trials, was as brutal as the Nazi years. The “Prague Spring” of 1968 promised an improvement in life, but this was shut down by the Soviet invasion and permanent settlement of 200,000 Soviet troops in the country. It was before the borders were completely closed that Jindra, her husband Pavel and their young son Peter managed, separately, to flee to England. Both Jindra and Pavel were academics who had lectured in philosophy at Prague’s prestigious Charles University. After a few years in England, they migrated to New Zealand where first Pavel, and then Jindra, took teaching positions at the University if Otago.

            When Jindra Tichy speaks of the Nazi occupation, she speaks not only of daily terror, rationing and hunger, but she also expresses great pride that her mother risked her life taking part in armed resistance. She knows the unexpected nuances of history. There’s the fact that Czech partisans had fought, and cleared Prague of Nazis, a day before the Red Army arrived; but throughout the years of Communist rule this fact was suppressed. (When I spent a week in Prague in 2018, I noticed in Wenceslas Square placards, in Czech and English, celebrating the city’s self-liberation – see one of the photos I took below). Even lesser known is the fact that the Vlasov Army, an army made up of Russians who collaborated with Hitler for their own reasons, played an honourable part in dissuading the Nazis from razing Prague to the ground when they were planning to retreat. Most surprising of all, she is frank about the brutal ethnic cleansing that took place just after the war, when the three-and-a-half million Sudeten ethnic Germans were driven out of the country. Much as she loves her homeland and its people, she is not blind to the wrongs they have done.

            Of the Communist years there can be little positive to say. In Tichy’s account, Communist dogma meant the complete destruction of what had been – before Nazi occupation – a functioning liberal democracy with a healthy market economy and a thriving industrial base. The country was systematically impoverished. People were promoted to responsible positions in industry not for their competence but for their loyalty to the Party. Similarly students were given preference in scholarships and places in universities not for their academic abilities, but according to their social class – proletarians first. Trade unions were Party-controlled and the right to strike was abolished. Freedom of expression ceased to exist and the threat of Soviet invasion was constant. In intellectual life, propaganda took over from reasoned discourse. At Charles University, courses on Marxist-Leninism had to be taught in all departments. In the philosophy department, where Pavel taught, formal logic was supplanted by dialectical materialism. As a philosopher, Jindra gives her opinion thus:  “There is no philosophy of science in the works of Marx and Engels. Dialectical materialism is just gibberish, using a kind of pseudo-scientific vocabulary.” (p.113)

            The effect of this upon the Czech people was sheer ambiguity. Those who live in open societies often wonder why those in closed societies don’t more openly challenge oppressive regimes. But this train of thought shows only how little outsiders know about the working of totalitarian regimes, rather like some silly left-wing academics Jindra met in England who justified the invasion of Czechoslovakia as the USSR helping a “fraternal socialist country”. The great majority of Czechs despised the Communist regime, but to keep their jobs (or not be sent off to the local gulag) they had to play by the rules. This meant academics knowing full well that what they were compelled to teach was rubbish, and even joking about it when in safe spaces, but still teaching it as ordered. In the post-Communist years, this led to much retrospective guilt.

            Jindra Tichy’s reaction to the Prague Spring is surprising. She does not hail it as the beginning of a possible renaissance for the Czechs, but condemns it as a delusion. Speaking of Alexander Dubcek, the man who attempted to introduce “Communism with a human face” she says “I am sorry for Dubcek and what happened to him, but I bear a grudge against him because he allowed us to fantasise about this wonderful new society when he must have known that the little charade about a democratic and just society that would suddenly spring into being was just a monumental lie, and that the Soviets would never allow it – he grew up and was educated in the Soviet Union.” (p.88) Further she remarks “The invasion of 21 August 1968 taught me several valuable lessons. It showed me that socialism could not have any human face: that was just a dangerous delusion of Dubcek’s.” (p.85) Communism was in effect irredeemable, and any attempts to “reform” it led to its collapse, as happened when Gorbachev attempted to “reform” the USSR in 1989.

But her travails, and her people’s travails in Czechosolovakia are only part of this memoir. On the matter of exile  she says: “I  want to add… that the first years of exile were the toughest years in my life. To lose the country of your birth, the people you love, your mother tongue, your culture, is hard. As we know from Plato’s dialogue Crito, when Socrates is given the choice between emigration and execution, he chooses death. After years spent in exile I understand why his was probably the right choice.” (p.133)

Even so, of her and Pavel’s time in England she says: “I had fallen in love with the centuries-old traditions, with a literature that produced such a genius as Jane Austen, with the little towns and villages in Devon… but mainly, I had fallen in love with the freedom of the people, the principled government, with the rule of law, free market economics and a sensible right-wing ideology.” (p.171) She says similarly flattering things about New Zealand, where she has now lived for many years, which she found to be “a democratic and just society” and enjoyed “the goodwill of the people.” (p.237) She tells the charming story of learning English, in England, by reading and studying the novels of Jane Austen, especially Emma. She does, however, take some time adjusting to the rainy English climate and is distressed that, while Pavel gained work and completed his PhD in formal logic at an English university, she was not able to find work. In New Zealand, she once again has to get used to alien food and the fact that chilly houses are not properly insulated. Pavel becomes an associate-professor in philosophy at Otago, but she herself never makes it in the philosophy department. Instead, thanks to her fluency in Russian, she gets to teach in the Russian department, revealing her lifelong admiration of classic Russian literature despite her loathing of the old USSR. Later, her knowledge of European politics and parties allows her to specialise in teaching political science. But gradually her interests change, and she becomes a novelist in the Czech language.

It is here that, admirable life as her’s may have been, I’m bound to point out what goes wrong with this interesting memoir. There are many important areas of her life about which she is too discreet – I would even say evasive. At one point she casually mentions that it was common in Czechoslovakia for spouses to take lovers as a matter of course – or at least it was common in the circles in which she moved. She says she too had a lover… but we hear nothing more about him. She deals very cursorily with the break-up of her marriage. Only very late in the text does she admit that she and Pavel had been drawing apart for years, at which point she gives some anecdotes about how grumpy he could be to students and how he alienated many of his colleauges. Of his sad ending (possibly a suicide, but the coroner left an “open verdict”) she says very little indeed. It is understandable that such a traumatic event may have been too painful for her to dwell upon at length. Even so, it is jarring to see how abruptly she deals with it.

Even more alienating, however, is the structure of this memoir and the way she presents her material. There is much repetition and many such phrases as “As I said earlier…” and “As I said before…” suggesting that she did not think her way through this material from the outset. Her opening chapters give a rather laborious account of her ancestors, something that could have been presented more concisely. She is comfortably settled in New Zealand when suddenly, in Part Five (titled “Socialist Disaster”) she goes back to telling us more about the manifest evils of Communism in Czechoslovakia, about which she has already dealt at length. Granted this more-or-less leads into an account of her visit to the post-Communist Czech Republic, I still get the general impression that Prague in My Bones could have done with more professional and rigorous editing. In saying this, I am in no way criticising Jindra Tichy’s robust opinions and world view.

 

Footnote: In 2015, I reviewed on this blog Jindra Ticha’s first novel to be written in the English language Death and Forgiveness. While I went out of my way to show how much I was in sympathy with the author’s ideas, I also noted the flatness of its prose and the clumsiness of its structure. One thing I wrote was “I know nothing of the author’s personal circumstances, and do not know how much she is dealing with issues from her own life.” But I certainly did detect a strong autobiographical note in the novel. I also wrote “I too often had the sense that I was reading a memoir, giving one party’s view of a failed marriage.” This would appear to be confirmed by the little she writes about the breakup of her marriage in Prague in My Bones. Another point of interest. In Death and Forgiveness her name is given as Jindra Ticha. In Prague in My Bones it is given as Jindra Tichy. I assume this was a concession to the English language which does not have both male and female forms of surnames, as Slavic languages have. 

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

 

            Everybody has strong opinions about Lionel Shriver, the American novelist who gave herself the name “Lionel” when she was a tomboy teenager wanting a more masculine name than the “Margaret Ann” her parents had given her. Now in her mid-60s, Shriver spends half her time in New York and half in Britain, and she has absorbed much of British culture as her latest novel Should We Stay or Should We Go reveals.

Shriver seems to court controversy and is condemned as much as she is admired. Her best-known, or most notorious, novel We Need to Talk about Kevin concerned a mother trying to cope with an evil son who commits a mass shooting of students at an American high-school, an event which has happened more than once in reality. The novel focused on the mother’s angst and the toll that raising a child had had on her when she wanted to pursue a career. But many read it as general revulsion against motherhood and having children at all. Shriver is heterosexual, married and childless by choice, and she supports the “Population Concern” group which lobbies for severe restriction of population growth. At a writers’ festival in Australia, Shriver gave a speech condemning the modish concept of “cultural appropriation” and received much flak. She was kicked off one literary judging panel for loudly opining that books should be published on literary merit, not because of the ethnicity or sexuality of the author. And, in Britain, she supported Brexit and repeatedly expressed concern over the many immigrants entering the country and radically changing its culture. Any one of these issues could – and does – start heated arguments, especially as Shriver is a regular columnist in many publications as well as a novelist.

Should We Stay or Should We Go has her wading into another controversial topic.

In the early 1990s, when they are still healthy and in their fifties, the English couple Kay and Cyril Wilkinson agree to a suicide pact. To escape the fate of Cyril’s father, who died senile and incontinent, and Kay’s mother, who is clearly sinking into Alzheimer’s, they will kill themselves when they are 80. That way, they reason, they will avoid going through the most humiliating processes of ageing and being helpless. Cyril, an ardent socialist, also says that if they and other old people were to do this, they would be freeing up beds that the NHS could give to more deserving younger patients. Aren’t senile old people just clutter anyway? Cyril is a doctor who has access to the lethal drugs they will need to carry out their plan… but when it comes to 2020, and they are now 80, Kay suddenly has misgivings about the suicide pact. She still wants to live a bit.

Dare I say that Lionel Shriver sets up this situation in her opening chapters with laboriously self-expository dialogue? But there’s lots more exposition to come, for the novel that follows is a series of alternative possible outcomes. In one scenario, their attempt to commit suicide turns into pure farce. In another, Cyril commits suicide but Kay doesn’t. In yet another, Kay commits suicide but Cyril doesn’t, and his three adult children then accuse him of murder. Or Cyril is sent to a hospital where he becomes immobile and capable of communicating only by winking.  Or Kay and Cyril live out their lives in a boring geriatric home. Or their children gang up on them and they are sent to a “home” which is more like a penitentiary where they are mistreated and from which they try to escape. Or (with Shriver jumping into science fiction) a miraculous drug is invented which reverses the ageing process and Kay and Cyril, like all other old people, become young and healthy again… but the problem is that, with nobody now dying, the world becomes grossly-overpopulated (one of Shriver’s bugbears) and besides, immortality proves to be boring. And with more science fiction, in another scenario, they take to cryogenics and are revived eons later into a world so alien that they wish they were dead. Of course there is one scenario where they live happy and fulfilled into very old age and die naturally. But that is not where Shriver is ultimately going.

By now, you should have realised that Shriver’s big topic here is (voluntary) euthanasia. As, in this novel, most of the alternatives to planned suicide are presented as horrific, you can see which side of the argument she really approves. She also has a number of incidents in which either Kay or Cyril die by accident, the intended moral being that we all die anyway, so why should euthanasia shock us? Need I say that this elides many reasoned arguments against euthanasia? Should We Stay or Should We Go is set in the era of Covid 19 and Brexit (hence the double meaning of the title). In at least one chapter, where Kay and Cyril are overcome and killed by invading non-European immigrant hordes, we basically get the type of alarmist rant that I have noticed on this blog only in Jean Raspail’s very racist The Camp of the Saints.

I wouldn’t underrate Shriver’s powers of observation in all the specific settings where her scenarios are staged. Nor would I underrate her dry wit, savage though it sometimes is. But in the end I found Should We Stay or Should We Go polemic rather than novel, giving one side only of a complex problem.