PEARL
K.
BELL
75
Communist tyrant, the foul-mouthed and wily Stoyo Petkanov, awaiting
the show trial that will fill the remainder of the novel. With skillful
agility, Barnes shuttles between the voice of the old monster in the
dock, forever the unregenerate, unapologetic defender of hard-line
Communism, and the voice of the Prosecutor General, Peter Solinsky,
once a Party
apparatchik
and now an uncertain apostle of democracy
who proves unequal to the task of nailing his adversary for the horrifying
crimes he had committed against his countrymen.
In the course of the trial, Petkanov unleashes a venomous torrent of
contemptuous abuse on the prosecutor and the new regime, though he
reserves his most scurrilous obscenities for the man he loathes above all -
Gorbachev, "that weak fool in the Kremlin who looked as if a bird had
shat on his head," and who "couldn't even keep his own wife in line, so
what chance was there of his stopping the counter-revolution once it
had started?" Outside the courtroom, the housewives have been replaced
by students hoisting furiously ironic placards: "Thank you for the price
rises. Thank you for the food shortages. Give us ideology not bread."
What Barnes acidly attempts to show as the trial limps toward its
disarrayed finale - most of the charges against Petkanov "had petered out
in squabbles and forgetfulness," and he is sentenced to thirty years of in–
ternal exile, a meaningless punishment for a nonagenarian - is that the
bureaucrats and leaders of the new government are just as corrupt as the
Communist tyranny it replaced. The most pressing needs of the people
have been met only with empty promises. The prosecutor is confounded
by Petkanov's claim that the old regime at least gave people "stability
and hope" but "you have only given them instability and hopelessness. A
crime wave. The black market. Pornography.... you do not even give
them sausage."
All depressingly true, of course, underscored by Julian Barnes's icy
cynicism. Yet one can't help feeling that he has loaded the dice, that his
pessimistic disdain toward the unsettled post-Communist world, his ob–
sessively ironic cast of mind, have led him to simplistic and superficial
judgments about the former Soviet satellites. He's much too impressed,
even awed, by the brute force of Petkanov as he presents the cunning old
monster, and a little too eager to sneer at the fumbling incompetence of
the prosecutor. Even more dismaying is Barnes's tacit assumption that
Communism may very well triumph again in the cyclical transfigurations
of history: As Petkanov gloats, "... in
our
next jump we shall squelch
the capitalists down into the mud until they expire beneath our boots."
Yet all this is not analysis; it is the drama of voice and confrontation that
intrigues Barnes. What he lacks is the political intelligence and experi–
ence of a Silone, an Orwell, or a Koestler. Ventriloquial virtuosity,
