The most formative book in my life was the Sword of Honour trilogy by Evelyn Waugh (1952-61). It’s an epic novel set during World War II, with a hero (sometimes an anti-hero because he’s quite wet) called Guy Crouchback. It’s laugh-out-loud funny in some places and wants to make you weep in others. Crouchback is assigned to a special forces unit and deployed to Yugoslavia, where he witnesses the nascent totalitarianism of the supposedly admirable communist Partisans. This book made me realize that the war was not the black-and-white heroic narrative I was being told at school, which at the time (I was 12) was a shattering discovery.
When I was packing to go and live in communist-run Czechoslovakia in 1988 my friend Gideon Rachman gave me The Engineer of Human Souls (1977), a long novel by the emigre Czech writer Josef Škvorecký. (the title is a quotation attributed to Stalin). I realized my Czech was improving when I was able to pronounce his name properly without having to think about it. It tells the story of Daniel “Danny” Smiřický, starting with his life in Nazi-occupied Bohemia and ending in Canadian exile. If you like books by Milan Kundera or Ivan Klima, you will find Škvorecký even better.
The third book is Baltic Countdown (1984) by Peggie Benton, whose husband Kenneth headed British intelligence in Riga in 1940. It’s a poignant but unselfpitying account of a married couple’s attempt to “keep calm and carry on” as Europe topples into the abyss. I don’t know a better first-hand account of the last months of pre-war Latvia. It includes family and personal dilemmas, plus some startling glimpses into the world of intelligence; I am not sure MI6 would allow it to be published now. Books about the Baltic states were rare in 1980s Britain. This cast a light on what at the time seemed to be a completely obscure area.
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