The Fall,Brick by Brick

The characters are self-absorbed,with commitments and responsibilities of varying degrees about the creation of a socialist state — there are Brano Sev,the lonely,stoic and ruthless agent and officer of the People’s Militia; the younger and smarter Gavra Noukas who isn’t quite sure why he is an agent and is continuing as one; and Emil Brod,the oldest,who ends up as Chief of Police and simply wants to solve cases and get on with his job.

What rivet you to the set of five are,of course,the shifting locales,the dark side woven so completely with lofty ideas and the painstaking research that forms the backdrop of the series. Now,with the East European countries trying to cope with their past,its residue and the trauma of trying to integrate,on uncertain terms,with the rest of the world,these books offer a fascinating window to what life was in those times. The sparsely stocked shelves of supermarkets or General Secretary Tomiak Pankov’s birthday celebrations are contrasted with repeated temptations for the characters to cross over,run away and escape to the West — a promise of life with the favourite lover,“football matches on TV on the weekend” and another kind of empty pointlessness (as brooding agent Sev characterises it in The Vienna Assignment).

Each of the five novels is located in specific historical moments that resulted in cracks in the iron veil,which resulted in furtive contact between the first and the second world — the Hungarian uprising of 1956,the Prague Spring of 1968 and,finally,the pulling down of the Wall. With each crack came offers and temptations and they brought out the worst in agents,neighbours,peasants,wives and students.

Steinhauer mixes politics and the personal choices of characters very well. The twists and turns are best brought out through the life of a student,Peter Hauer,who is seemingly harmless and apolitical. Because of an infatuation,he joins a “pro-democracy”,students group in Prague and,then,out of murderous self-interest betrays both his fellow-students and a lovesick soldier from the other side who has come in to crush the Spring but is desperate to get back home.

The covers are very much reflective of the books,dark but enriching and absorbing portraits of the hopelessness of the human condition. It is difficult not to finish each of the five books at one go,but Victory Square is perhaps the best — as the last three days when the regime (Romanian,it is guessed) is staggering and pro-democracy conspirators are getting together with those in power,trying to bet on the future and stay on the right side.

Twenty years,they say,must pass between an event and a historian,to be able to judge as historians should (and not in the way journalists or political scientists view things). In the past few months,bookshops have been cramped with titles on the events leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall. But,somehow,two decades don’t seem enough to either shake it all off or judge the consequences,or both. There are many more countries in East Europe now,Yugoslavia is seven and Czech and Slav are two — sometimes easier to spell and tougher to understand. Prague and Budapest with checked tablecloths and cobbled streets are firmly on the tourist map.

Twenty years could seem a small length of time also because crumbling bits of the wall are still sold to tourists in plastic packets in Germany — so maybe we should concentrate on marking 400 years of the telescope and wait a little while longer,in the hope that it will get clearer with time. Till then,there is Olen Steinhauer.