Patrick McGuinness

Bucharest, 1989. A young British student flies to the Romanian capital to accept a university position that he was not interviewed for, and he does not understand what is expected of him. He is met at the airport by Leo O'Helix a foreign 'professor' who becomes his mentor and closest confidant, although Leo's teaching responsibilities are a cover for illegal activities that make him a wealthy and respected man. Romania is in a state of increasing crisis, as freedom movements are taking place show more throughout the communist world, while Nicolae Ceaușescu, one of the last Eastern European dictators, seeks to hold onto power by fear and violent suppression.

The narrator is introduced to several young underground activists by Leo, and he meets the beautiful Westernized daughter of a powerful minister, with whom he falls in love. He also befriends a retired government official, and helps him to write a secret memoir that is highly critical of the Ceaușescu regime.

As the year progresses, the Ceaușescus' hold on power weakens, which leads to increased crackdowns on dissidents and repression of ordinary Romanians. The narrator finds himself in increasing danger, despite his ties to the British embassy and his friends, as the Securitate is aware of his friends and activities that support the removal of Ceaușescu from poewr.

The Last Hundred Days was an unusual selection for this year's Booker Prize longlist, but it is a thriller that deserved to be there, and it should have been selected for the shortlist, as well. McGuinness, who lived in Romania during the end of the Ceaușescu regime, paints a compelling and convincing portrait of communist Romania, a country where ordinary citizens queue for hours in line without knowing what, if anything, awaits them, whose citizens routinely die of starvation, and where historic churches and other buildings are torn down and replaced with concrete, poorly built monstrosities. This was an impressive debut novel, and I look forward to reading more from its talented author. show less

Als man eine Frauenleiche findet, scheint der Täter offenkundig: der etwas exzentrische Einzelgänger Michael Wolphram, der das Opfer auch kannte und gar nicht verhehlt, gelegentlich mit der attraktiven jungen Frau gesprochen zu haben. Vor seiner Pensionierung war er Lehrer am Chapleton College, das auch Alexander, einer der beiden Polizisten, die den Fall untersuchen, besuchte. Er hat gänzlich andere Erinnerungen an den Mann als das Bild, das die Presse schnell von ihm zeichnet. Sein show more Kollege Gary will eigentlich nur noch die notwendigen Beweise sichern und den Fall abschließen. Was zunächst offenkundig scheint, wirft jedoch schnell einige Fragen auf.

Patrick McGuiness erzählt zwar oberflächlich in "Den Wölfen zum Fraß" einen klassischen Krimi, darunter liegt jedoch eine scharfsinnige Analyse der Gesellschaft, die auf unterschiedenen Ebenen von Vorurteilen und klaren Grenzen zwischen den Schichten und Bevölkerungsgruppen geprägt ist. Die Frage nach dem Mörder rückt immer wieder hinter diese zurück und eröffnet so Raum für weitaus größere und interessante Aspekte.

Die beiden Polizisten sind perfekt austarierte Partner, die trotz ihrer Verschiedenheit, oder vielleicht auch gerade wegen dieser, hervorragend zusammenarbeiten und sich ergänzen. Alexander der gebildete, studierte, der mit klarem Kopf sachorientiert vorgeht; Gary repräsentiert mit seinem Dialekt eher die Arbeiterklasse, zu der er naturgemäß bei Befragungen auch besser einen Draht aufbauen kann.

Durch die Rückblicke in eine längst vergangene Schulzeit eröffnet Alexander nicht nur ein differenzierteres Bild des Verdächtigen, sondern zeigt auch wie eng die realen und geistigen Mauern des britischen Internatslebens sein können und wie schwierig es für Außenseiter ist, dort Fuß zu fassen. Mehr noch allerdings exponiert er die Presse, die blutsaugend hinter dem Fall her ist. Die Geschichte basiert auf jener von Christopher Jeffries, der 2010 wegen des vermeintlichen Mordes an Joanna Yeates durch die Boulevardblätter bereits verurteilt wurde, bevor überhaupt die Polizeiarbeit abgeschlossen war.

Kein Roman, der mich von der ersten Seite gepackt hätte, sondern einer, der zunehmend sein Potenzial zeigt, dessen pointierte Sprache ihre Bedeutung erst langsam enthüllt und dann erst erkennen lässt, um was für einen großartigen, bis ins Detail ausgefeilten Roman es sich handelt. show less

The Last Hundred Days are those of Ceausescu’s Romania. The real historical events leading up to the Romanian Revolution are a scaffold for the fictional narrative. The story is told from the vantage of an expat Brit who was just looking to get a job and it happened to land him there during the last few months of the regime in 1989. The author, Patrick McGuinness, lived in Romania at the time and so would seem to have an insider’s authentic impressions. He is also a poet and writer, and show more professor of literature at Oxford, and it is his wonderful prose that elevates this novel.
“As a power-saving measure, museum visitors were organised into groups and the lights in each room were turned on as you entered and off as you left,…It was like a tide of darkness following you, engulfing room after room behind you as you went.”
“Trofim greeted everyone as if he had heard of them before, as if they came to him cresting the wave of a happy reputation.”
“This is what surveillance does: we stop being ourselves, and begin living alongside ourselves. Human nature cannot be changed, but it can be brought to a degree of self-consciousness that denatures it.”

The book was longlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2011, and I was struck by the similarities it shared with another Booker nominee that year, [b:Snowdrops|9579671|Snowdrops|A.D. Miller|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1329600686s/9579671.jpg|14466568] by [a:A.D. Miller|1158347|A.D. Miller|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1379233436p2/1158347.jpg] (which unaccountably made the leap to the short list). Both books could be described by the same paragraph: An English expat ends up in (Romania, Russia), not entirely of his own volition but wants to make the best of it and make a good impression. He falls for an extraordinarily but mysterious beautiful woman, who may, or may not, be what she seems. Could she be a double agent? The characters in his life are pragmatic idealists, or are they?, and he learns quickly that life in (Romania, Russia) is definitely not what it appears to be on the surface. Corruption, hypocrisy and violence are the currency of (Romania, Russia). Despite the hardships and privations, extraordinary by British standards, he begins to feel part of his new home country. But even that might not be enough to withstand the extreme turmoil that is about to happen.

I think this is the kind of book to which [b:Snowdrops|9579671|Snowdrops|A.D. Miller|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1329600686s/9579671.jpg|14466568] was, in vain, aspiring to be. I even idly wondered if the Booker judges actually meant this book to be the shortlisted one, but got tripped up by a series of clerical bunglings (Dame Stella imperiously waves to the underling clerk and says, “put this book about the Brit duck-out-of-water in a communist country on the short list; it will add a bit of variety.” )
There are a rich assortment of characters, reminiscent of the cast of Casablanca, and some of the descriptions are funny. “Their parties, an endless round of cocktails and booze-ups,…the circuit as a whole is…’a doppelgangbang: where largely identical people fuck each other interchangeably’” His beautiful girlfriend is dismissed by a cynical friend as “Ah, Cliea — a girl of many layers; layer upon layer of surface…”

This book gives us illuminating glimpses into the deep darknesses of humans, and we see ourselves.
“For all the grotesqueness and brutality, it was normality that defined our relations: the human capacity to accommodate ourselves to our conditions, not the duplicity and corruption that underpinned them. This was also our greatest drawback — the routinisation of want, sorrow, repression, until they became invisible, until they numbed you even to atrocity.” (Of course, we like to think of ourselves as the more noble and heroic characters in the book, not the venal corrupt ones that are more akin to our least favourite acquaintances.) “…The system was breaking down into its constituent parts, paranoia and apathy, and as the centre started to give way the two were left to engage in their great, blurred, inconclusive Manichean struggle. Apathy and paranoia: two drunks fighting slowly around a park bench.” show less

This is an interesting semi- autobiographical novel set during the last few months of Ceausescu's rule in Romania in 1989 (though it covers eight or nine months, not the three and a bit months the title implies). The author was present at that time and it shows in the very evocative descriptions by the unnamed narrator of the texture of life in Bucharest at this time, the stifling oppression, privations and utter absurdities of Ceausescu's highly personalised rule. It includes some show more interesting debates on the nature of freedom and the compromises that every Romanian had to make to survive on a day to day basis. Indeed, so much so, that one wonders why the author chose to write this as a novel, with real life characters under disguised names, rather than openly writing a memoir. It is a bit of a slow burn. The first third or so is quite slow moving but it picks up pace. A good read for anyone interested in modern European history or in the modes of thought and action of modern dictators. 4/5 show less