The novel offers an account post-Communist show trial in the heart of darkest Eastern Europe told as a test of wills between the defendant, the 35-year dictator, and the prosecutor, a professor of law, who got the assignment because no one else wanted it; too many skeletons in that closest. They spar in interviews and also in the courtroom.
During the tumult of the Change, when the Red regime fell, most records were destroyed and few records were kept in the first place. Should evidence of the dictator’s undoubted crimes be fabricated, or will the new regime settle for convictions for pilfering office supplies? Enter Fox News which I am sure could puff up a few office supplies to an unprecedented national disgrace with its distinctive combination of hysteria and ignorance.
I gave the game away when I referred to this as a ‘show trial’ for while the new regime wants to break with the past, needs must. The prosecutor has a crisis of conscience. True believers remain and perhaps the old regime will return.
The deposed tyrant is no fool and he gives as good as he gets in his confrontations both in interviews and in court. A decisive result is necessary.
It all becomes didactic. Argument and counter argument, and not much recognisable human feeling in any of it. There is a kind of utopian element in the ambition to create society anew, to build a new and better society, but it is not developed in this short book.
Julian Barnes
I read It in 1993 but retained no memory and when I happened to see it on the shelf I tossed it in the pile to take to Hastings in 2015.
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