Always true to you, reader, in my fashion
Timothy Mo
MOSCOW! MOSCOW! by Christopher Hope Heinemann, £13.95, pp. 191 Novelists are suspiciously good at writ- ing travel books, and travel writers are similarly adept at producing fiction of a high technical standard. It makes you wonder, in your more cynical moments, who's telling the tales. Thus — on nothing better than a hunch — I would guess that much of that very fine writer, the late Bruce Chatwin's travel writing was pure fiction; events never happened, people were the creatures of his imagination. At the other extreme are the authors whose accounts comprise quite faithfully what happened to them. Sometimes too faithful- ly.
A further distinction can be drawn be- tween the travel writing which is founded on exhaustive research and exhausting travel and that which is based on a succes- sion of quick and comfortable forays. In the first case, the author learns the lan- guage, and spends nine months travelling rough. In the second, a cosmopolitan from one of the great capitals of the world makes his elegant way from one of Conrad Hilton's establishments to the next, shoot- ing his cuffs and jotting as he goes. The assiduous researcher deserves to write the better book and he or she often does; but homework is no substitute for talent and the less conscientiously equipped some- times produce the better literature.
Christopher Hope's Moscow! Moscow! falls into the category of paras 1.2 and 2.2: le he's a non-whopper-telling inhabitant of the first-class carriage. Hope's report from the USSR is not that of an old hand or an expert. Far from it. The genesis of his book was an initially unpromising three-week official trip to Russia. I know just how unpromising because I was on it. Indi- vidual Russians became, and indeed still are, friends but the memory is of intermin- able toasting and speechifying by amateur writers in the provinces and at the end the awe with which one beheld the lemon in the BA mineral water. But Mr Hope was made of sterner stuff, Awcn., when he felt like it, and generally preparing the ground for the return trips which make up the present book.
When describing the daily life of those Soviet citizens not members of the official classes it is difficult to rise above the level of the obvious. Existence certainly is hard and dreary. The notorious queues do exist (as Hope says in one of his innumerable one-liners, a restaurant is only full when it's empty) and there really is nothing at all in the shops. The consumers have roubles by the fistful, but that's not the problem, you see. And the inefficiency and corrup- tion are impossible to exaggerate. The system forces people to live by their wits, and it makes them as aggressive and surly as mistreated animals. Just getting through the day entails cunning, low subterfuge, and dishonesty. Fellow citizens are nothing of the kind: just rivals for what can be obtained. In short, the vices of early Marxist capitalism are fully exhibited. How to get beyond this and write some- thing more original? You can't — unless you want to write fantasy. The distinctive thing about this slim book is not that it will tell the well-informed anything new, but the elegance, the wit, and the brilliant command of language and irony with which a familiar tale is re-told. Also Hope's utter honesty. He talks well of the Russian crowd, vodka queuers or delegates to the Supreme Soviet, displaying 'a kind of inflamed docility, a furious meekness'. The young people in the bohemian coffee- house appear poor yet each has one item, a haircut, a brooch, a scarf, worn with such panache 'that the impression one takes away is not of deprivation but of raging stylishness'. At a school somewhere on the dreary outskirts a young girl asks with a sweet and deadly innocence that she has heard people in the West regard her country as a totalitarian state; is that also Hope's opinion? Trapped and stung into brevity and mannerlessness, he says yes. The teachers look at their toe-caps. The girl nods and sits down gravely, as if there is nothing more to be said. He has con- firmed all they knew. At Lenin's tomb a small boy asks why are they all waiting. `Several people quietly admire the prophe- tic nature of this question.'
Yet, in the end, for all Christopher Hope's wit and skill, the clever way he maximises the vignettes with Victor the waiter who is really a currency dealer, Gennady the taxi-driver who doesn't know the way, Alya the working girl in her white thigh boots, the tour he is unable to find, the receptionists who say 'Go to your room and wait' (the Soviet service industry's equivalent of 'have a nice day'), his material is no more than a glorified tourist experience can provide. It is a conjuring trick by an accomplished pro.
Where the book is useful and salutary is in its hard-eyed account of glasnost and perestroika. Compared to the tone of most Western journalists, Hope is a terrible spoilsport. In a material sense things do not get better; they are becoming unimag- inably worse. Hope's friends are not optimistic; they are overcome with cynicism and pessimism. They have no faith in their government at all.
It is not to be confused with anger, or discontent, as is felt and expressed in West- ern societies towards political ineptitude or injustice. This feeling goes far beyond anger. It expresses itself in cold contempt for the present political authorities, or in icy indif- ference to talk of reform . . .
I still flinch when I remember the look bestowed on me by a mild-looking poet as I delivered my bumbling conventionalities on Gorbachev. It ain't like that.
In the end there is something quite moving about Moscow! Moscow! Hope finds the absurdist logic of the Soviet authorities oddly reminiscent of his own South Africa and the final chapter, begin- ning with the bureaucratic aftermath of a child's death and the small human kind- nesses and courtesies which soften it, then moving to a bigger burial, actual and figurative, is the best in the book. Hope is too good a writer and shrewd an observer ever to say so directly, and there is no chapter on youth as such, but he implies youth thinks it thinks differently. It's not all pessimism.
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