A Desert In Bohemia
-
- £5.99
-
- £5.99
Publisher Description
It is 1945. Somewhere in Central Europe, in the aftermath of violence and confusion, a terrified and bloodstained young woman, Eliska, emerges from the forest to take refuge in an apparently abandoned castle. Soon she is joined by others - the idealistic Jiri, the sinister Slavomir and his partisans, and Count Michael Blansky, who is the castle's ancestral owner.
But the war has changed things for ever. In a storm of ideological change, the existing order and the aristocratic heritage of ten generations are brushed aside by the arrival of Communism, and Count Michael must join the flood of refugees if he is to survive. He leaves behind a legacy which will entangle those involved for the next forty years in more ways than they can possibly imagine.
As divided post-war Europe unravels around them, they must make what they can of lives buffeted by circumstance. For many, individual freedom is at best problematic. For better or worse, communities are destroyed, families uprooted, and the ties of trust, friendship and duty which bind them together are broken down by the implacably irresolvable forces at work. Told through the eyes of nine characters who live through the forty years between the end of the war and the fall of Communism, A Desert in Bohemia is a complex and enthralling testament to the power and powerlessness of the individual in challenging times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's a signal achievement when a novel manages to be serious, important and philosophically provocative - and infused with narrative urgency, suspense, pathos and passion as well. A Booker finalist (for Knowledge of Angels), Walsh has put all of these qualities in her fourth novel, plus a cunningly orchestrated plot, a relentlessly chilling atmosphere and indelible character portraits. Set in Comenia, a fictional Czech- and German-speaking Eastern European country, the book chronicles the swift and brutal progress of communism in the years following WWII. Walsh follows nine characters over four decades, from 1945-1990, as their lives - already shattered by harrowing wartime experiences and now dislocated by political tyranny - intersect. Three men endure the pain of exile. Count Michael Blansky slips away from his magnificent castle in Comenia as Red partisans take it over. His friend and neighbor, Frantisek, leaves his family's textile factory and escapes to England, where Michael's son, Pavel, has already been sent. Meanwhile, Eliska, who has crawled out of a pit of massacred villager, cleaves to an abandoned baby girl she finds in the castle. She begins a new life with Jiri, and idealistic young Communist. Other characters include Pavel's typically English teenage daughter, Kate; Tomas, Kate's cousin; Hedva, the woman presumed to have betrayed Frantisek to the police; and Anna, Michael's proud older sister, whose wartime experiences threaten to disgrace the family name. Questions of identity haunt these uprooted characters, for even those who remain in Comenia are dislodged from the past by political revisions of social history. The moral dilemma that infuses the narrative with dignity and purpose is articulated by a British professor who is arrested when she delivers a philosophy lecture in Comenia: "Can someone's virtues be a hostage to their circumstances?" When survival is at stake, how does one behave? Intellectual questions never overpower the novel's immediacy, however. There are shocking scenes when the reader's heart drops as through a trap door, and intensely emotional moments when the paradoxes of moral choice play out in heartbreak. There are sweet surprises, too, with the possibilities of redemption and healing. And Walsh's lucid and graceful prose style, impregnated with compassion, makes this vivid human drama irresistible - and a handselling natural.
