Lambada Country, Giles Whittell (1992)
An illuminating account of a ride from the Baltic to the Black sea as the red tide receded from eastern Europe
Chapmans 1855925915 Octo 218pp £14.99
Whittell’s ride, through East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria in 1990 was a deliberate attempt to capture something of Eastern Europe at this turning point in its history. Only months before he made the journey, communism had ‘collapsed’ in one Soviet satellite after another. As he reached the Turkish border, Germany reunified and his narrative closes.
A journalist by trade, Whittell clearly sets out to meet, interview, and often to enjoy the hospitality of, people along the way. Most of his encounters come by chance – a few are the result of leads generated before he departed. There are military pilot’s in Bulgaria, a doctor and his family in Romania, Anna Walentynowicz the ‘mother’ of Solidarity in Poland, political activists, students, factory workers and many, many more.
It is a highly effective, if obviously impressionistic, picture that he paints – both of the condition in which these countries emerged from communism, and the hope and confusion that ordinary people felt during the tumult. Many in Romania and Bulgaria, for example, doubted whether revolutions had occurred at all in their countries, suspecting that palace coups had been dressed up for the western media.
He has a good eye for a telling detail, and the sense to serve such nuggets up for the reader to evaluate, rather than trying to fit them into an argument of his own. The one thing that there is not very much of is cycling, particularly in the first half of the book. This does not detract from the quality of his encounters, but at times seems like an opportunity lost.
Here he is, nonetheless, on one of the few mentions of his mode of transport in the Sudenten mountains.
“The process of movement (on a bicycle) is necessarily as intoxicating or soul-destroying as what you move thorough. And the means of transport largely determines the nature of the waylaying. You get hailed by potato-pickers. You take tea with the famer who lends you a bucket to find a puncture. You pedal up a side road because you are going slowly enough to notice it. The stopping and the going are of a piece; a very satisfying one. But it is also a balance. If you want to speed up from an average of five to fifteen miles and hour you have to cut down of the gawping.”
As he progresses eastwards, there is slightly more cycling – and to good effect. He crystallises the difference between Bulgaria and Romania, for example, in a way that is the unique product of his means to travel.
The picture that emerges is a fascinating, if slightly depressing one. Happily, though, this is territory that has now been revisited by a succession of insightful cyclo-documentors, such as Andrew Eames and Natasha Scott-Stokes, whose testimony provides an illuminating update on Whittell’s subjects. And for real context, there is, of course Patrick Leigh Fermore’s celebrated travelogues to give some impression of what eastern Europe was like on the cusp of the toxic wave that the second world war would unleash on Europe.
Whittel’s narrative leaves you with all sorts of questions in your mind. How was it that communism seemed like such a permanent feature of human organisation, until the point where it evaporated almost overnight? How did the west Europeans so completely put out of mind countries that are but a few hundred miles from our own borders. And, how did the people of eastern Europe tolerate for so long a system that, for all the undoubted benefits it brought, was in essence monstrous. There are no answers in this book, but there is plenty to stimulate purposeful thought on the subject.
PS Aug 10