Pravda Ha Ha: True Travels to the End of Europe
RORY MacLEAN
(Bloomsbury, 368 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064
Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, The Berlin Wall and The Most Dangerous Place on Earth
IAIN MacGREGOR
(Constable, 352 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064
In one of many surreal moments in Pravda Ha Ha, Rory MacLean is riding the Moscow metro when a bird, trapped in the crowded carriage, flutters in panic and then comes to rest on the shoulder of a young African man. Sami is a migrant whose muddled odyssey leads MacLean around the fringes of post-Soviet Europe. After adventures in Belarus and Finland, Sami ends up in a kebab shop in Lancashire, serving lads well soused in beers and vodka chasers.
Sami is one of many characters who populate MacLean’s travels across the chasm that separates today from the Europe of 1989. Thirty years ago, MacLean wrote a pioneering travelogue from the collapsed Communist world, when optimists saw a blissful dawn and chauvinism seemed to be as dead as Marx. It was a sad illusion, he concludes, but the sadness is tempered in his new book by wit, empathy and phrase-making skills of the sharpest kind. It is both melancholy and entertaining.
Over it all looms Russia. MacLean has a Russian friend in London, “a moneyed non-dom who filled her time with lunches at the Connaught and with Chelsea Centre evening classes: French literature, Italian cookery and Forex trading for beginners”. She leads him to Dmitri Denisovich, a “mini-oligarch” chicken billionaire who truffles for the fabulously costly mushroom known as Putin’s Pecker. Obligatory brushes with blondes, Kalashnikovs and alcohol follow. Denisovich expounds on the Russian soul. But Denisovich is in trouble of a vaguely McMafia kind and, much as he admires Vladimir Putin, exile ensues.
