7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Impassioned story of life under communism, February 19, 2001
Jill Paton Walsh's novel about the effect of communism on a small corner of Eastern Europe is structured around nine people encountered at various points in their lives from 1945, when the Russians overran Czechoslovakia, to 1990 and liberation.
The first section introduces the primary characters in the midst of the horror, fear and confusion accompanying the Russian liberation and occupation of the country. The eerie, dramatic opening finds Eliska, a terrified young girl, drenched in blood not her own, taking refuge in an aristocratic country house. She discovers an infant girl in a dough trough under the kitchen table. Bread is rising on the table and a milk bottle has been warmed on the stove but no one answers the child's cries of hunger. Eliska takes up the baby and the bottle and ventures hesitantly to explore the house. The place is vast and glittering and grand. And empty. As is the surrounding village; everything left in haste. Eliska milks the cow, chops wood for the fire, bakes the bread, tends the baby.
Her precarious idyll ends when a shaken young man with a gun turns up. A country boy turned zealous communist, Jiri is soon followed by a thuggish gang of fellow partisans who arrive moments after the house's owner, Count Michael Blansky, home from the war. Blansky is forced to flee but another wealthy neighbor, factory owner Frantisek Konecny, neither an aristocrat nor a Nazi collaborator, chooses to stay.
Walsh picks up each of these lives - and those of the children who follow - in moments of crisis or change as the years pass. She finds Konecny in 1948 as the village attempts to reconcile the habits of country life with communist rule. His factory nationalized, denied university placement because of his background, Konecny becomes a lavatory cleaner until charges of corruption force him to flee. He leaves behind a fiancée who may have been his betrayer and struggles to forge a new life in exile.
By 1967, Jiri, married to Eliska and adoptive father of the found baby, Nadezda, has become, in frustration, a dissident. Communism fired his inquiring mind with idealism, now that fire has made him discontent with the slow pace of classless liberation. Sticking to his ideals, Jiri attends a Marxist study group, which, one by one, is carted off to jail or fired or ruined or all three.
Count Michael's boy, Pavel, brought up in exile, marries an English woman and feels little connection to his walled-off homeland. He keeps his heritage alive by sending his daughter to spend summers with County Blansky and his sister near the border of their iron-curtained homeland. Kate, entering adolescence, feels only impatience for her relatives' mourning of a bygone birthright.
Walsh's compassionate characterizations illuminate the strains of individual lives and the sometimes senseless accommodations made under repression. Jiri, under government orders to produce grain unsuited to the land, purchases the crop to fulfill his quota. The characters are passionate about ideas; even those who avoid politics for practical matters (the women) have strong ideas about heritage, personal loyalty and obligations. Discussions of philosophy and moral duty fire the men but these never become preachy, partly because of the impassioned quality of the writing and partly because these discussions take place in moments of drama - before or after being carted off to jail or escaping across international borders or fighting with a spouse.
Walsh's ideas are embedded in life, part of its fabric. She uses moments of crisis to move the story along, of course - the drama of the fleeing refugee, the excitement of Pavel's defiant, heroic assistance to dissidents in a homeland he barely remembers, Jiri's resistance to threats and intimidation and his final capitulation, Count Michael's journey on foot across the border upon the fall of communism.
But the incidental details of everyday life flesh out the narrative. The exiles in London who prefer to speak English among themselves, the grades of jail cells that wordlessly communicate status and prospects, chemotherapy pills packed in vitamin bottles, political prisoners despised by the real criminals in prison, the Rom who camp on the Count's land and know the best routes over the border, the gulf between parents and children who see them as hopelessly foreign.
The fall of communism provides fresh absurdities and some hardships and hard feelings but mostly the reopened border promotes healing and gives Walsh's book a satisfying, redemptive conclusion. A fine, thoughtful, moving novel by the author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted "Knowledge of Angels" and many other novels, detective stories and children's books.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Some Lovely Set Pieces, April 9, 2002
By A Customer
I recognized the title of this book immediately as having been taken from my favorite Shakespearian play, "The Winter's Tale." Since I love that play so much I thought I just might love this book as well.
"A Desert in Bohemia" is set in the fictional eastern European country of Comenia during the years between the appearance of the Iron Curtain at the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
"A Desert in Bohemia" includes a cast of characters...this is essentially an ensemble book...however, the first character we meet is Eliska.
The year is 1945 and Eliska, the only survivor, is emerging from the common grave where more than 300 of her fellow villagers lie dead. Frightened and bloodstained, Eliska makes her way to what she believes is an abandoned castle and finds that it is not abandoned at all...there is a baby inside. The castle is the ancestral family home of the Blansky family and, although it is not entirely deserted (bread is rising on the table and milk is warming on the stove), it does contain many secrets.
Only a few hours later, Jiri, an idealistic young communist makes his appearance in the house and, shortly after Jiri, we meet Count Michael Blansky, the castle's owner. Next to seek refuge in the house is Slavomir, Jiri's Red Army comrade. Slavomir is just as dedicated to the cause of communism as is Jiri, although he is driven primarily by a need for power.
Growing unrest (and the false charge of being a Nazi sympathizer) causes Count Blansky to feel the need to leave the house (and Comenia) and he soon flees to England and seeks asylum with his son, Pavel. Blansky's neighbor, Frantisek Konecny, however, chooses to remain and his life will become entwined with the lives of those now living in the Blansky castle.
Paton Walsh certainly puts her remaining characters through much trauma: forced labor, torture, imprisonment, betrayals, terror, corruption of all kinds and even forced psychiatric hospitalization.
Although I didn't think this book quite came together as it should have, it does contain some lovely set pieces. The saddest occurs when Count Michael, who has been living near the border of Comenia, manages to gain surreptitious entrance to that country with his granddaughter, Kate, in an effort to have one last look at Libohrad, his ancestral home. What he finds instead is heartbreaking and it involves Eliska, Jiri and the baby found in the castle, now a young woman named Nadezda.
The characters' stories do intertwine very nicely and Paton Walsh does a good job in bringing philosophical questions to her narrative without sounding heavy-handed. But the book does seem to change its focus near the middle, or just before. What began as a marvelous book of ideas and of the effects of communism on a disparate group of characters, becomes a thriller instead. It was much better as a book of ideas.
The ending of the book also presented problems for me. I found the rather happy ending experienced by most of the characters to be too pat, too hopeful and almost too "sweet." I would have preferred to read about a more realistic portrayal of communism and circumstances in eastern Europe today.
"A Desert in Bohemia" isn't a bad book at all, but neither is it an outstanding one, or even one above the ordinary. It has some lovely set pieces and some memorable scenes. It is well-written, but for me, at least, it just didn't come together. It just didn't gel.
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