Though many, if not most, attempts to socially engineer a better world have failed, often disastrously, it is difficult, even with the benefit of hindsight, to condemn them. Popular movements are animated by the grievances of the masses who, when ignored, churn and boil until they finally explode in righteous revolution. No matter how bloody the revolt, nor corrupt the regime implemented in its wake, we cannot fault the people for seizing back the power so long denied them. However, if we cannot condemn them for the attempt, we can condemn them for the result, for not recognizing when their experiments have failed. We can condemn them for holding onto power with the same, sad desperation of those they once overthrew, believing so fervently in their dogmas that they cannot admit defeat. This is the potent lesson that underpins Mr. McGuinness' quiet, icy novel.
The year is 1989. Bucharest, once Romania's gleaming jewel, is a befouled and broken city, a sea of concrete seemingly in constant, pointless flux. Far from the worker's paradise promised by Communism, this shattered place with its barren supermarkets, its police checkpoints, and its mandatory rallies, is the personal plaything of Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania's bloody and brutal dictator. Though he claims to rule at the behest of the people, Ceausescu is little more than an aging tyrant, a man driven to libidinousness and madness by years of ugly, dictatorial deeds. For all of this, he is still dangerous, moreso now that his greatest ally, the Soviet Union is disintegrating before the eyes of the world. For unlike his fellow Communist dictators who are acceding to Western reforms, he will fight to the bitter end, confident in the misguided belief that his people love and worship him.
Into this painful and existential morass sinks a young man from Britain. The story's narrator, he describes how the sad dissolution of his family precipitated his going abroad. Working at a university in Bucharest, he quickly falls in with the great city's anarchists and revolutionaries, looking on laconically while, in their own ways, they try to preserve what they can of the past while agitating for the revolution of tomorrow, for a time when, no longer able to sustain itself, Ceausescu's decrepit regime collapses under the weight of its own shameless lies. Though the narrator imagines himself to be at the heart of an earnest if smalltime conspiracy, he soon discovers that matters are not as they seem and that, in a security state, where informers outnumber the honest by ten to one, nothing is ever achieved without the notice or the consent of powerful, corrupted interests.
Long listed for the 2011 Man Booker, Mr. McGuinness' sharp and insightful examination of the death throws of the Romanian dictatorship is as cold and surgical as a scalpel. The unnamed narrator, beset by his own troubled childhood, expresses little in the way of emotion as he endures the daily grind of living and working in one of the world's last Communist strongholds. As he watches everyone around him fight, bargain, scheme and conform in hopes of advancing their own ends, he's the perfect, opinionless lens through which the reader can view and experience life at the end of a failed experiment. For make no mistake; the Ceausescu regime, in the winter of 1989, is a dying animal, a creature in desperate need of being put out of its misery, a demon that, nonetheless, continues to fight on and cling to power because this is all that it knows.
The Last Hundred Days rewards the reader with plots and counter plots, with keen observations and thinly veiled criticism. But for as ably as Mr. McGuinness captures the feel of 1989, his metaphors are his most effective weapons here. As he recounts the various ways in which humans try futilely to escape a machine that refuses to release them, the deathly cold of winter hangs over everything; the universal freeze of entropy to which all must inevitably decay. It's powerful work that more than compensates for the quiet isolationism of its narrator, a man who seems only halfway present in the story of his own, muted life.
A grim tale of end times and how, inevitably, they are nothing more than the beginning of the next chapter of the same, tired story. (3/5 Stars)
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