The Cruellest Years | eBooks

Anastasia is a powerful and engrossing read about a period of history that deserves to be remembered. Rupert Colley's skill in writing novels lies in his ability to create characters that the reader truly cares about. His characters are never simply mouthpieces for the political and social ideas of the time, but are fully rounded, complex individuals with their own personal stories. We see this especially, for example, in Zoltan Beke who is an AVO (secret police) officer. It would have been all too easy to create a monster, after all the AVO were the Hungarian equivalent of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany. But Zoltan is portrayed as a real man who loves his wife and daughter (even though he lets them down because of the pressures of his job), who is a little bit scared of his boss and who isn't such a ruthless thug as his assistant. Even though his work leads him to do terrible things, it's possible to feel empathy for this character. What Colley shows is that whilst the system may have been evil and corrupt, there are real human beings on all sides with their own personal fears, desires and motivations. Nothing is simple. Similarly, the author introduces a sympathetic Russian character into the story. The novel opens in 1949 with a football match about to be played between the Hungarians and Moscow Lokomotiv. Valentin Ivanov is one of the visiting Russians who meets and falls in love with Eva, a Hungarian teacher. Inevitably, he is one of the Russian soldiers who, seven years later, enter Budapest with their tanks to put down the uprising. The novel is set in 1949, 1953 and 1956 and follows the lives of Zoltan (the AVO officer), Eva, George (a Hungarian footballer) and Valentin (the Russian.) It paints a vivid portrait of life in communist Hungary prior to 1956 so that the reader can understand why the uprising took place at all. It is a powerful story that draws you in, makes you care about its characters and feel their pain and suffering.

Turbulent historical setting? Check. Vivid descriptions? Check. Realistic and likeable central character? Check. Page-turning excitement? Check. Heart-stopping denouement? Check. Passion, heroism, betrayal? Check, check, and check. It all adds up: My Brother the Enemy is an excellent work of historical fiction from Rupert Colley (his first written, my second read), this one set in Hungary, beginning a few years post-WWII and moving through the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The book follows a set of Jewish twins, Janos and Lukacs, who have managed to escape from the Nazis during the war only to be forced afterwards by the communists to relocate to an impoverished little village where they attend a state-run school and watch their once-prosperous father drink himself into oblivion and inebriated rages. A few years later they manage to attend university in Budapest where they take an active role in the revolution. Janos and Lukacs may be identical twins but their strikingly different personalities and love for the same woman create the book's central tension and keeps those pages turning throughout the novel's vivid historical settings. However, just occasionally, the verisimilitude of those settings cracks when Colley lets slip a Britishism or two. Words and phrases such as "buggered" "sod off" "bloody liar" " the f-ing lot of them" "things were a-changing" (OK, that last one is as American as Bob Dylan), might have been replaced by more generic terms or even possibly Hungarian words with translations somehow neatly tucked nearby. But this is just an occasional issue. For 99 percent of My Brother the Enemy I nearly believed I was closely observing the conflicted lives of two brothers as they experience the dreary oppression of post-war communist Hungary and the heady thrill of its mid-century revolution.

I've always thought the Solzhenitsyn course I took in college was all I'd ever need for an insider's perspective of Stalinist Russia. But although it's been decades since took that course, I don't recall being quite as thoroughly chilled by Solzhenitsyn's works as I was with Rupert Colley's The Black Maria. Perhaps this is because 1) Solzhenitsyn came to understand the evil of the system not as a civilian but as a respected military man before he was arrested and sent to a labor camp for criticizing, in a private letter, Stalin's handling of World War II; and 2) his most powerful works deal with imprisonment: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, In the First Circle, The Gulag Archipelago, for example. Colley's protagonist, Maria Radekovna, on the other hand, is a civilian who is relatively free (although arrest and imprisonment are constant threats) and perhaps that is why I found her to be a more relatable character than many of those found in Solzhenitsyn's great works. When her story begins, the reader finds Maria tightly bound by the tentacles of the secret police. Her brother Victor, having returned from a labor camp an emotional vegetable, is the reason she has been forced into a job that requires her to "out" someone every two weeks, someone who is (or isn't -- it really doesn't matter) being every so slightly disloyal to the State. Victor's sad life would be over if Maria didn't keep making her twice-monthly reports against her fellow-citizens, most of whom haven't uttered a disloyal syllable. Their lives for her brother's. Maria is also trapped in a loveless marriage with an insipid Party official because he knows something about her history. And in this real-life dystopia items in one's past that would be considered inconsequential from a western perspective could be absolutely devastating for those who were existing in this time and place. On the horizon of Maria's oppressive world there suddenly appears a handsome, independently-minded artist who is, for the moment, enjoying state-sponsored patronage only because Stalin can see the propaganda value in art -- "The artist is the engineer of the soul." Passion, loyalty, love, betrayal, and death play out between a small cast of finely crafted characters within a page-turning plotline, as they always do in Colley's historical fiction. But this book kept me turning (er, clicking) the pages a bit faster than the others. Perhaps this has something to do with the book's construction or else because The Black Maria takes place in Moscow, in the heart of Soviet Russia (as opposed to a satellite Iron Curtain country like Hungary, the setting of Colley's My Brother, the Enemy). Moscow in the 1930's was Communism exactly as Stalin desired it to be and this book gives a close-up view of the constant terror Muscovites were forced to endure as Stalin's secret police waged their ideological war on their own people via purge after endless purge, denunciation after endless denunciation. Colley, a former librarian, wrote The Black Maria after wading through multiple accounts of those who had witnessed the Soviet terror. It shows. He even -- quite chillingly -- is able to get into the mindset of those orchestrating this "war", phrasing it like this: "We are fighting a war, and our enemy is an internal one, one that doesn't wear a uniform. We must always be vigilant; we can't afford to spare the rod, not until our work is done.' They were, most unfortunately, true to their aims and the way in which Colley captures this piece of history will stay with the reader perhaps longer than they wish it to.