The inspiration behind Far to Go is Alison Pick’s own family history.  Her grandparents were forced to flee from persecution in Czechoslovakia during the Second World War, eventually settling in Canada.  She uses this to create the story of the Bauer family, a priviledged Czech family who are Jewish by birth but don’t really practise their faith.  However, Pavel, Anneliese and their young son Pepik are Jewish enough to become targets as the Nazi occupations spreads across Europe.  The family must try to work out how best to escape and Marta, their non-Jewish nanny, must decide exactly where her loyalties lie.

The Second World War is a subject which is eternally popular (if that’s the right word) in historical fiction and there are a whole host of memoirs and autobiographies from that time, so a book has to try rather hard to stand out amongst so many voices.  Far to Go succeeds because it has a different situation and a different tone to other books that I’ve read in a similar vein.  Where other novels of the Holocaust can be beautifully, elegiacally tragic, bleakly depressing or even ultimately hopeful, Far to Go feels unusually dirty and distasteful in a way which is extremely effective.  This is not a straightforward book but one filled with complex emotions: it is about betrayal which is ultimately understandable, divided loyalties with no possible solution, the physical ache of regret, and bitterness rather than tragedy.  The atmosphere is particularly well created.

The novel also deals with an aspect of the Holocaust which I’ve not really read about before, most of the books I’ve read being set in Germany.  Pick illustrates well how different the situation was in Czechoslovakia, showing the conflict between Germans and Czechs as a more complex level underlying the usual Nazi/Jew dichotomy.  She also chooses to make her characters a family of secular Jews, and in doing so she is able to explore such a variety of different reactions to the persecutions: Pavel becomes more Jewish, driven to explore the faith which makes him an outcast; Anneliese is desperate to throw off the stigma of Jewishness and escape, and Marta the gentile nanny is forced to see her employers in a totally new light.  Marta’s struggle to decide what to do in her situation comes across as very real and human, and I like the fact that she is neither a saint with no thoughts for her own security nor a selfishly motivated traitor.  I’m sure there were many people who felt exactly as Marta did and were just as confused about their sudden change in status, so it feels very believable.

For all its interesting new perspective, this book is not without its flaws.  The four different strands of narrative in quick succession which open the book (a letter from one character, a letter which it’s only later possible to tell is from a different character, a brief first person section with an unidentified ‘I’ and ‘you’, and the main body of the story in third person with different characters again) are initially very confusing.  It’s impossible to tell if these people are all the same, partially the same or all different and there’s no obvious features to link the four sections together.  It is only as the reader progresses through the book that it becomes apparent who is being referred to in each of them, and while this technique can be effective, I found it to be a few too many things at once with which to open a novel.  This mixed structure continues throughout, and while the inclusion of the letters is particularly poignant, I found that it held me at arms’ length from the characters and their actions.  I watched them experience these powerful emotions and although the overall emotional tone of the book was impressively well drawn, as I’ve already stated, I didn’t find myself feeling along with them but observing from a distance.

The other niggle that I had was the use of Czech words and phrases.  The way that they’re sprinkled throughout the text is actually a rather nice touch as it grounds the novel very firmly in one specific place and adds an authentic flavour of Czechoslovakia.  However, the terms used are rarely explained within the context of the story, and having no experience at all of Czech language, Czech food or Czech cutlure I had no idea what all these things being talked about were.  I know that lengthy explanations can sometimes be tedious and laboured to read and if they are words that Pick is used to using because of her Czech heritage then it may just not have come up as an issue, but at least the first time a Czech term occurs it would be nice if there were some sort of explanation of what it means without me having to resort to constant Googling.   The simple expedient of adding a glossary to the end of the book would solve this problem wonderfully.

Far to Go by Alison Pick.  Published by Headline Review, 2011, pp. 314.  Advance review copy.

Title:

Author: Harry Bingham

Published: Harper, 2006, pp. 442.  Originally published 2006

Blurb: Misha is an aristocratic young officer in the army when the Russian revolution sweeps away all his certainties.  Tonya is a nurse from an impoverished family in St Petersburg.  They should have been bitter enemies; and yet they fall passionately in love.  It cannot last and, as the political situation grows ever worse, Misha is forced to flee the country.

Thirty years later, Misha has survived the war and seeks to rebuild his life in the destroyed city of Berlin.  Then, one snowy winter’s day, he glimpses a woman who resembles Tonya.  Can this be his lost love?  Drawn into a dangerous double game of espionage and betrayal, the two lovers struggle to find each other, as the divide deepens between East and West…

When, where and why: I have no idea when or why I bought this, but I’ve definitely had it for long enough to it to become book 31/50 for my (rather optimistic, given the date) Books Off the Shelf Challenge.  I decided to read it as one of the categories in the challenge in which I’m taking part on Goodreads was to read two books by different authors which shared a common word in the title.  After the success of The French Lieutenant’s Woman I decided that ‘lieutenant’ was my word and so this book came out of hibernation.

What I thought: Initially I found this book quite disappointing.  After reading Anna Karenina earlier this year I was looking forward to a return to Russia in this book, but Harry Bingham doesn’t do the landscape justice and the vocabulary and description never quite got there: it didn’t feellike Russia.  The story also starts off with a string of unbelieveable events, which doesn’t help matters: Misha, a former aristocrat, instantly trusts and takes into his confidence Tonya, a member of the working class, whose cousin is an important figure locally in the revolution and has just been round to seize more of his family’s belongings.  Sounds completely realistic to me.  Naturally, Misha and Tonya fall in love, but this is portrayed without any preamble or sense of development, so I wasn’t invested in their relationship in any way because it came out of the blue.

Fortunately, this section of the story is quite short and the narrative picks up a great deal once it relocates from revolutionary Russia to post-war Berlin.  I’ve read a lot of historical fiction books surrounding the Second World War but I think this is the first one which deals with the aftermath of the conflict rather than the fighting itself, so it was very interesting from that perspective.  This second part of the novel follows the separate lives of Misha and Tonya as they try to cope in the ruins of a city governed by four different armies (although only three, the British, the Americans and the Russians, are of any relevance to the book), never giving up hope of finding one another again.

I enjoyed the fact that, after such a swift romance in the initial stage of the novel, Harry Bingham doesn’t give Misha and Tonya an easy ride after this.  There are continuous near-misses as the two are almost reunited again only to be foiled by circumstance, and this allowed me to develop the interest in seeing their relationship succeed which was absent from the portion set in Russia.  I also liked Bingham’s decision to give both Misha and Tonya lives outside of their love for one another: I find novels where the characters fall in love instantly, are separated after a few months and then spend the rest of their lives waiting for one another deeply unrealistic, so I was happy that the book didn’t go down this route.  Instead, Misha and Tonya both marry and have families and, although these are naturally conveniently out of the way by the time the two lovers try to find one another again, I appreciated this nod to realism.

Sadly, I thought that this novel went full-circle: it had a bad beginning, a good middle and reverted to a bad ending.  I found the way that Bingham provided a brief historical outline of the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of separation between East and West Germany in the complete absence of any plot to be lazy.  It would have been netter if the lapsed time had been implied by a dated chapter heading, as in other places in the novel, or fleshed out so that these events seemed relevant to the characters.  Left as it was I thought it was a bit sloppy really.  It’s a shame this book was so let down by its introduction and conclusion.

Where this book goes: This one is staying put for now, but it’s a marked man now.  I have a collection of books tagged that I wouldn’t mind losing if I need to get rid of some prior to moving house, and The Lieutenant’s Lover is headed there.

Tea talk: In this book, Tonya’s cousin remarks to her: “The greatest empires of the world have always been tea-drinking.  The Chinese.  The Mughals.  The British, of course.  Now it’s our turn.  The rise of the Russian tea-drinking empire”.  What else could I drink in honour of the Russian tea-drinking empire but Russian Caravan?