Your digital subscription includes access to content from all our websites in your region. Access unlimited news content and The Canberra Times app. Premium subscribers also enjoy interactive puzzles and access to the digital version of our print edition - Today's Paper.
Milena pushes back the iron curtain for young love, leaves behind a privileged life as a senior official's daughter in a smaller communist country and finds there isn't even central heating when she makes it to England in time for Christmas, 1984. Freedom is not just something that comes in a plastic wrapper on a Western supermarket shelf.
The life left behind in Vesna Goldsworthy's novel is not the one usually conjured in the Western imagination of communist rule. Instead of the bread line, Milena and her circle of approved friends have Ray-Bans and Coca-Cola, and easy access to movies and music from the other side of the curtain. Milena and her friends are the children of those in the Party who are by far first among equals.
Enter Jason, a 27-year-old poet from the United Kingdom, who jets into the East for an international poetry festival, the kind of event staged to give the appearance of openness. This rough-around-the-edges self-proclaimed Marxist proceeds to fall in love with Milena in a matter of days, while she is his festival-appointed translator. He hatches a plan to get her to come to London; she takes a while to come around to the idea.
Eventually she gives the signal: she asks to borrow Jason's poetry collection from the British Council library; the librarian is in on the ruse. Luckily for Milena, the harsh travel restrictions on most Soviet citizens don't apply to the upper class. She just has to convince her parents to let her stop over in London on her way to a state-sanctioned holiday in Cuba. No need to brave the bullets over the Berlin Wall for some.
Talk about star-crossed lovers. The odds really are stacked against Milena and Jason. Even the Montagues and the Capulets had the courtesy to live in the same fair city. But the stakes heighten and hasten Milena and Jason's relationship. In a scene about which Sigmund Freud could say much, Milena wonders what it would be like to have sex with a Western man. Would it be different? She soon finds out in her father's bed, after taking Jason home to find him a suitable coat for the winter.
Of course this relationship has an air of unbelievability. Does anyone move this fast? But how could it be anything else? Goldsworthy treads a careful line between the plausible whirlwind, cross-border romance and it being too silly on paper. There wouldn't be a novel if Milena was sensible and stayed put after her fling with Jason.
At the heart of the novel is the question of what is the sensible path to take. The West haunts Milena's childhood: it stands, she is raised to understand, in stark opposition to everything her father believes and works for, but it also provides the material riches her family and its circle access through rarefied back channels. Her first boyfriend believed everything in the West was better, because it was from the West. Milena actually gets to live on the other side.
Jason lives in London in circumstances no self-respecting Soviet country would allow, Milena tells herself. He struggles to make rent, eats horrendous food, drinks abominable wine and is frequently bitterly cold. He seems to sustain himself on the self-made promises of poetry. This is the artist figure which pops quite a bit in literature. Goldsworthy revisits the theme to good effect. Jason can be sweet and caring - he even does the dishes sometimes without being asked - but he is ultimately self-indulgent and useless. "I knew, by now," Milena says, "that his Marxism was as decorative as his Irishness - it had no practical consequences and called for no commitment to action ... he was a genuine opportunist." Jason believes, and is occasionally vindicated so, that his genius will sustain him. Milena is left to do the hard work.
Milena discovers, on arrival in London and after her registry office marriage to Jason, she will need to look for a job. State planning will not come to the rescue. The flat they live in is misery with four walls, but they make it work. Milena navigates supermarket shelves and job interviews, and money starts coming in before she gives birth to twins. Was the sacrifice of Eastern comfort worth it for what has turned out to be the illusion of Western freedom, only available to those who can properly afford it?
Goldsworthy dedicates her novel thus: "To all my friends, who, like me, grew up east of that line from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic." There is a kind of elegy here for a completely lost way of life, that involves knowing, with certainty, you will be surveilled and controlled, but cared for, housed and employed. But neither the East or the West in this novel gets the airbrush treatment.
It would be possible to read library stacks' worth of books about what life on the eastern side of the curtain was like, trying to understand the feeling of the late Soviet Union, its collapse or defectors coming to grips with life in the West. Or you could read this book.
Jasper Lindell joined the Times in 2018. He is a Legislative Assembly reporter, covering ACT politics and government. He also writes about development, heritage, local history, literature and the arts, as well as contributing to the Times' Panorama magazine on Saturdays. He was previously a Sunday Canberra Times reporter.
Jasper Lindell joined the Times in 2018. He is a Legislative Assembly reporter, covering ACT politics and government. He also writes about development, heritage, local history, literature and the arts, as well as contributing to the Times' Panorama magazine on Saturdays. He was previously a Sunday Canberra Times reporter.
Sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date.
We care about the protection of your data. Read our Privacy Policy.