Colin Thubron - Time Seen As A Road ... Or A River

 

Colin Thubron

There is something mellifluously melancholy in the tone of Colin Thubron’s travel books. He is a wonderful writer, a genuine poet in prose. Curiously, his writing manages to be both orientated entirely inward, whilst also being outward-looking at the same time. It really is quite remarkable. And it is perhaps this paradox which is what makes his travel books such satisfying reading. As travel writers go, he is perhaps the travel writer’s paragon – the kind of travel writer whom most would-be travel writers might aspire to emulate. Oddly shy and unassuming, and yet open to experiences and interactions. He frequently ends up chatting to all sorts of ordinary and unusual people, tagging along with them, sharing a train compartment, or being invited into their homes and their lives; drifting along, progressing on his way until something or nothing happens. Either way the outcome is equally mesmerising. He does bathos and pathos with aplomb.

 

There are moments of drama too, usually rendered with beautiful understatement, such as when the police turn up and haul him off for questioning, as they frequently seem to do. This is usually because Colin is drawn to the parts of the world which aren’t exactly used to receiving visiting tourists, at least not those of a lone hapless, wandering Englishman-type, such as he appears to be. Naturally they suspect he must be up to no good; some sort of criminal or clandestine activity, possibly spying? – But Colin is wonderfully ‘old school’, as some might say. He tends to eschew modern technology, and he rarely travels with a camera. Only his spidery and illegible handwriting in his notebooks inadvertently lends him a taint of suspicion, but as soon as he begins to translate his scribbled notes for his interrogator, the police quickly come to realise Thubron is indeed a wandering poet, waxing lyrical about landscapes they find mundane but which he sees as sublime.

 

I came to Colin Thubron’s travel books quite late, and I really can’t understand how or why I had not come across him before. It was an interview he gave on BBC Radio 4, back in early 2007, when he was promoting his then recently published book, Shadow of the Silk Road. I was entranced by his evocative descriptions of travelling through landscapes and reflecting upon the history of places which had long held a deep and abiding fascination for me. And it was later on, in the summer of that same year, when I was travelling through China, that I began reading Shadow of the Silk Road for myself. I realised it was kind of oddly serendipitous to begin reading the book there in Xi’an, where the book itself begins; but, unlike Colin, the journey which I was about to undertake would lead in the opposite direction, heading east, overland to Beijing. I had gone there to escort a cohort of terracotta warriors across China and onwards to London for a landmark exhibition at the British Museum, entitled ‘The First Emperor.’ Whereas the Shadow of the Silk Road recounts Thubron’s 7000-mile journey heading west, travelling from China through Central Asia and Afghanistan to the Islamic countries of the Middle East and on to the Mediterranean. A route along which he is haunted by the persona of another traveller, talking to him across the vast Steppe-like expanse of time in the bygone centuries-old voice of a Sogdian camel driver travelling with one of the old merchant caravans which used to cross the deserts and the high plateaus of the network of routes which once criss-crossed that region, now collectively and somewhat Romantically known as ‘the Silk Road.’

 

Thubron has often spoken of the solitary traveller as being two people travelling in tandem. There is the person who is actually doing the travelling – clocking the miles, suffering the pains and anxieties, marvelling at the wonders both large and small which befall him along the way; but then there is also the person, the travel writer side of himself, who (in a sense) sits upon his shoulder throughout the journey – noting all the things which will make ‘good copy’ for a travel book, and often consoling him with that fact when he finds himself in situations of adversity, such as when he gets questioned by suspicious police officers. The greatest fear for a travel writer, he has said, is that nothing will happen at all.

 

In reading Thubron’s books the reader experiences the world with him. He has such a wonderfully deft way with words and emotions that while his books are deeply personal documents, they also seem somehow oddly divested from him as their author. When he published To A Mountain in Tibet in 2011, I heard him joke (again on the radio) that people had sometimes complained that he didn’t put more of himself into his books, but that with this one, they might now wish he’d done the opposite, because To A Mountain in Tibet is a deeply personal book. It is a book about a journey he made on foot, a pilgrimage of sorts, making the kora around Mount Kailash – a sacred mountain which is central to the cosmology of several major religions, but at its core it is also a book which deals with the universally felt subject of grief. People often speak of life as being a journey or of time being seen as a road, and travelling – escaping the everyday of our own worlds and all that is familiar to us by going somewhere far away and utterly different in terms of society, culture, language, religion – this kind of travelling can be a way of reflecting upon ourselves, who we are, where we come from, and how we fit into the wider aspect of a globalised world. Travel is thereby seen as a way of breaking down boundaries, crossing borders and bridging divides which might otherwise have remained unseen or worse, wilfully overlooked. In that sense travel is not about seeking escape, but rather of seeking to find something extra. Redefining the self and our home in sympathy as well as in contrast to that which we might simply assume to be ‘other’ is what the real goal of most travellers tends to be. I read To A Mountain in Tibet at a time of similar although slightly different emotional upheaval in my life, and so the book certainly spoke to me on more than one level, as it was perhaps intended to do. It was a reminder to me that both travel and the closely allied activities of reading and writing can be a balm to the soul.

 

Thubron’s latest book, The Amur River: Between Russia and China (2021) is equally sublime. It is certainly one of Thubron’s best travel books, in my opinion. In this book he travels the length of the Amur from its source in Mongolia to the coast, opposite the northern part of Sakhalin Island, where the river emerges between the Sea of Japan and the Okhotsk Sea. It’s an enormous watercourse, undammed and largely unknown in comparison to its more famous cousins, such as the Amazon, the Danube, or the Nile. Along the way he alternates between the river’s northern and southern shores, between Russia and China. The Amur forms a boundary which both divides and connects these two geographically huge nations, each vastly different in culture and outlook, which meet along one section of its banks. The huge disparities in terms of populations and local economies makes the locals on either side of the river uneasy neighbours. As with all of Thubron’s travel books, he seeks out insights into the histories and cultures, both national and local, of the people whom he meets along the way. He relates the snippets of themselves and their lives as they reveal their personal stories to him. He is particularly interested in the original indigenous customs, seeking out the traces of shamans and their animistic beliefs which seem to linger, often half-forgotten, having almost been entirely obliterated by centuries of incomers hailing from the larger surrounding polities and their overwhelming tides of political and religious ideologies, seeking to modernise, revolutionise or capitalise upon an uncompromising land and an unruly watercourse which ultimately always seems to defeat them. 

One gets the sense from reading Thubron that the further he travels along the Amur the more remote it becomes, even from itself. It feels like a place oddly forgotten and removed from the wider world, even though the myriad worlds of its own which it forms along its course all seem somehow larger than life as it is lived in other parts of our modern and globally interconnected world. Reflecting upon this, he quotes one of my favourite writers: “In a poignant passage of Andrei Makine’s ‘Once Upon the River Love’, his protagonist speculates that you could spend your life on the remote Amur and never discover whether you were ugly or beautiful, or understand the sensual topography of another human body. ‘Love, too, did not easily take root in this austere county …’ (p.261-262)

 

I’ve often wondered about the Amur. Firstly, having come across it in other books I’ve read, particularly about nineteenth-century Russian explorers such as Nikolay Przhevalsky, who explored the Ussuri region, and Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky, who led the expansion of the Russian Empire to the shores of the Sea of Japan. And secondly, from having glimpsed parts of it or its tributaries when flying across Siberia en route to and from Japan, looking down upon such a vast and expansive frozen landscape with real fascination. Hence, I was very keen to read Thubron’s account of his following this long-flowing riverine thread through a land I’ve only ever glimpsed and imagined from afar. A river so long it has many different names, among which it is: the Onon in Mongolia, the Heilong Jiang in China, and the Amur in Russia. 

Thubron’s journey along the river’s course was not an easy one. In Mongolia he begins his journey on horseback, but not long after he sets out his horse stumbles in the boggy ground and falls upon him which results in a couple of cracked ribs and a broken ankle – and yet Thubron, who is in his eighties, stoically soldiers on, mentally kidding himself that his ankle is merely sprained. The thought of curtailing his trip and returning home to properly convalesce is a far more painful prospect than carrying on. Thubron is a true traveller to his core. And thankfully – as he always does – Thubron shapes a journey around himself which is inimitably his own. Mastering just enough of the languages of the people he travels among before setting out – in this case Russian and Mandarin – in order to converse with them unmediated. He says he takes a year to research and prepare before embarking, and then about a year afterwards to write his journey up. Consequently, his travel books are undoubtedly on a par with, and in some cases more than equal to those who have similarly found fame in defining the genre, writer-travellers such as: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Bruce Chatwin, Wilfred Thesiger, Eric Newby, Robert Byron, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Gavin Young, Paul Theroux, Dervla Murphy, et al.

 

I’m not at all surprised that Thubron is drawn to the fictional works of Andrei Makine. He and Makine clearly share a common ground in their fascination for the sublime, for Russian melancholy, and for deeply profound meditations upon the slow passing of time and memory, deftly rendered with the lightest and most masterfully-understated touches of true sympathy. For me Colin Thubron’s writings represent the pinnacle of what I am seeking in a good travel book: a deeply lyrical and contemplative exploration of both place and people, a deft mixing of history, anthropology, landscape, and atmosphere, illuminated through individual insight. The best travel books in my opinion, like a river, wend a slow and unhurried way through our shared world, showing us places far beyond our own doorstep – places which we might never see or experience for ourselves; but done so through carefully considered words, words through which we might see and live vicariously. Travel writing is undoubtedly a craft of its own kind, offering the reader an escape through someone else’s eyes – wherein words can shape mellifluous memories which often remain with us long after we’ve finished our first reading of such books. The Amur River is certainly one to treasure.

 

Somewhere over Russia, near the Sea of Japan - 2004

~

“In the mist of early morning the far shore next day is only a sepia hairline, as though the horizon had rusted away at its edges. The river is formidable now. For over 2,500 miles it has gathered its tributaries from a basin almost the size of Mexico, until its brown flood pours northward through a channel that sometimes reaches three miles across. As our boat shudders upriver in the lightening day, the eastern shore ascends in mountain walls of pine, spruce and birch, where wisps of cloud dangle, as if from steaming jungle. Even as we speed beneath them, Sergei and Alexander go on smoking, cupping the cigarettes in their hands against the headwind, while our beer bottles dwindle alongside a bag of frozen smelts with cartoon faces.” – Colin Thubron, The Amur River (p.247-248)

Colin Thubron - Time Seen As A Road - The South Bank Show, 1992

Also on 'Waymarks'

Andrei Makine - An Homage to Lost Time

Person & Place - The Essence of Good Travel Writing

Parallax - Patrick Leigh Fermor

The World Rent Asunder

'War of the Worlds - Men Hunting' by Robert Czarny, 2006.

London: 3 March 2022 – In January this year I read H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (1898) for the first time. It is one of those ubiquitous books which everyone knows, but which lots of people have never actually read. This was something which struck me when the recent BBC TV dramatization was aired a year or two ago. It faithfully set the story of the novel in its own time and its original place, unlike the most recent Hollywood adaptation, starring Tom Cruise in 2005, which transposes the action to modern day America. Or the earlier classic Hollywood version of 1953, starring Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, which also changed the three-legged Martian machines into boomerang-shaped flying saucers with cobra-headed heat ray guns. While watching the BBC version, I commented to my mother that I’d never read the original novel, but that I thought I really should someday, because the idea that H.G. Wells could have dreamt up such a fantastical fictional premise of aliens with advanced technology invading the Earth during the late nineteenth-century’s ‘Age of Steam’ seemed so far removed from our present-day conceptions of sci-fi. Noting this absent-minded musing of mine, my mother bought the book and happily surprised me with it as a gift for my birthday a couple of months later. But sadly, when I finally read Wells’ novel at the start of this year, I had no idea how tragically apt a moment it would end up being; to read such a book when the world was unwittingly drifting closer towards the edge of a moment of unthinkable change – a change wrought by the potential prospect of a third world war – when, at the end of the following month, Russia invaded the Ukraine.

 

As a kid growing up during the 1980s, as for many people of my age, my main point of reference for Wells’ War of the Worlds was Jeff Wayne’s musical version (1978), which we used to listen to as a family in the car. I’ve always remembered the sinister moment narrated by Richard Burton when the Martian cylinder begins to unscrew. For some reason this moment really captured my imagination. Like many kids, I was obsessed with the idea of extra-terrestrials and alien invasions. A fascination first fed by the films, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. (1982), as well as old television series, such as The Invaders (1967-1968) and more recent ones (at that time), such as V (1984-1985). Later on, of course, there was The X-Files (1993-2002). I always knew there was an element of Cold War paranoia hidden beneath the surface of such films, especially old ones such as the 1953 version of War of the Worlds, and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), or Invaders from Mars (1953). The common menace behind all of these films and TV shows was the unknown; that creeping insidious fear which permeated the Cold War – not knowing what the other side was up to, not knowing what they might be planning, but knowing that they had the means to destroy everyone and everything should they choose to do so. That threat of nuclear Armageddon with just the press of a button. It was something which anyone alive in those decades post-World War 2 up until the end of the twentieth century, when the Cold War finally seemed to come to a (largely) peaceful close in the period between 1989-1991 with the collapse of the USSR.

 

H.G. Wells (National Portrait Gallery)

For H.G. Wells the menace which inspired him with such dreadful visions of the future was something different, but something which nonetheless was at the very root of what the Cold War later became. For Wells, his fear was the dehumanising mechanisation of death. In certain ways, his novel foreshadowed the horrors unleashed on the grim battlefields of the First World War, which took place only a couple of decades after the publication of War of the Worlds in 1898. The incomprehensible truth of mankind’s inhumanity towards itself is envisaged as manifested in the form of a callously methodical and unsympathetic alien invader. And, in unleashing such a cold-blooded enemy upon the unsuspecting Earth, Wells’ very matter-of-factly - if somewhat macabrely - describes our familiar world being rent asunder, the everyday world torn to shreds by enormous three-legged alien machines stalking the land from sleepy Surrey into the bustling metropolis of London, which is reduced to ashes via war and anarchy as the systems and institutions of society crumble and collapse under the relentless onslaught of total war. In this very specific way, Wells clearly foresaw the modern ‘Blitzkrieg’ of the Second World War as much as he foresaw the senseless carnage of the battlefields being gassed during the First World War. Watching the senselessness of the current Russian military advance on multiple fronts into a peaceful Ukraine, the present war seems just as inexplicable as it is horrifying.

 

When I read War of the Worlds at the start of this year, I’d been surprised to see my hometown in northwest London given two mentions in the course of the novel. The majority of the action in the story takes place in Surrey, moving onto southwest and then central London, with an interlude in which we follow the course of the narrator’s brother, who eventually escapes England as a desperate refugee onboard a paddle steamer which manages to cross the English Channel to the Continent, despite being pursued by the Martian machines which are bravely opposed in a suicidal last stand made by a Royal Navy dreadnought. The macabre appeal of this truly remarkable novel is to picture the vivid descriptions of our sane and orderly world uprooted and utterly smashed by uncontrollable and unopposable forces. But as the events of the Second World War in particular should have taught us, such a flight of the imagination is not so fanciful. Those events are still within living memory for my parents’ and grandparents’ generations. It was the defining global event of their lifetimes, as was also the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962. I’d always thought my generation’s defining moment was that hopeful and optimistic era which witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, but since then we’ve had the shocking event of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in the USA, as well as the wars, insurgencies and subsequent terrorist attacks which have followed in their wake; then the current Corona virus pandemic, along with the increasingly worsening effects of global climate change as a backdrop to all of this, in just these first few decades of the 21^st century. And now we have the megalomaniacal madness made manifest of Vladimir Putin, an unopposed autocrat ordering his troops to invade a neighbouring sovereign state, all the while with his finger held poised over the nuclear button, as he has duly warned us.

 

Given such a clear and unequivocal threat, if we believe and sufficiently fear Putin’s resolve, our sense of existential dread certainly feels more acute now than it has at any point during the last 40 years. It is akin to that deeply sinister moment of hearing the cylinder slowly starting to unscrew itself in War of the Worlds. During my childhood my family always knew that in the event of a nuclear war we’d almost certainly be instantly vaporised because we lived only a matter of a few miles away from the NATO command centre at Northwood. There were undoubtedly a couple of nuclear warheads sitting in Soviet missile silos with our names written on them. In the more recent post-Cold War era, I’ve often wondered what has happened to those missiles. We understood that the nuclear deterrent had been downgraded on both of the formerly opposing sides of the Iron Curtain, but I’ve long been fascinated by the subsequent rise of the enigma that is Vladimir Putin. Over the last twenty or so years, reading articles speculating upon the psychological implications of his having been a KGB officer stationed in East Germany at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and how he and his comrades had repeatedly called Moscow for instructions when the protestors were hammering at the doors of the Soviet headquarters where he was rapidly shredding documents, but the line was dead. The only reply they received was silence. And not so very long thereafter the USSR itself was no longer a voice on the global stage. All that was left was the seemingly insubstantial ghost of a once great power. Only a year or two ago I marvelled as I read an article about the Soviet military base at Vogelsang, close to Berlin, which is now a ruin sought out by psycho-geographers and urbexers, but which was still manned and operational when I first visited Berlin in February 1993 on my second visit to the former GDR. Empty swimming pools, broken windows, trees growing through crumbling concrete, and paint peeling from sun-bleached Soviet Realist statues and murals. Looking at the accompanying photos of the base in its current derelict state it looked to me like something from a different era altogether, not like something which had been fully functioning in my own lifetime.

 

I’m currently living close to Westminster Abbey. Many years ago, a friend of mine who worked in the House of Commons told me that one of the reasons why the Jubilee Line extension on the London Underground system was so delayed in opening was because the construction workers had not correctly anticipated just how long it would take to punch holes through the former nuclear bunker which had been built beside the Houses of Parliament during the height of the Cold War. If you go into Westminster Tube Station and ride the escalators down to the Jubilee Line platforms, you can indeed still see the remnants of what looks like a much older concrete structure behind the newer beams and pillars of the station complex, so there may well be some truth to that conjecture. Hence, if Putin does press the button, Westminster Tube Station might not be too bad a place to hurry to during such an eventuality. If he does though, I think, remembering the sobering effect of watching Raymond Brigg’s cartoon of When the Wind Blows (1986), I’d rather disappear in the white heat of the blinding flash than survive in such a blisteringly bleak world thereafter. Scientists say the nuclear weapons which are extant nowadays are so far in advance of the power of any which have previously been used in anger at either Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or the nuclear tests of the 1950s, that we probably wouldn’t stand a chance if these weapons were put into action. There are no preparations we could possibly make for such an eventuality, and so – much like in the 1980s – we can only ‘keep calm and carry on’, as the British like to say.

 

'War of the Worlds - Thunder Child' by Robert Czarny, 2005.

What is more staggering perhaps, is to realise how the world seems to have sleepwalked into this current situation. Some say the West has handled Putin all wrong from the start. Rebuffing his friendly overtures towards the European Union and to NATO, determined to treat Russia as a second-rate world power, was arrogance and folly. Essentially NATO’s advance to the East (contrary to promises apparently made to Putin), as Vladimir Pozner suggests, has enacted a Cuban missile crisis in reverse. While others insist that there is no such thing as an “ex-KGB officer.” Putin was never a man to be trusted. In essence, he has simply been a ticking time bomb who has now reached the end of a very long-smouldering fuse. Time’s up. Whichever way you choose to look at it, this may well have been the inevitable outcome of either point of view. I recall a BBC TV interview with the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in 2019 (I think). In which he was asked if he thought the world was a safer place since the end of the Cold War, and he replied ‘far from it’ – he thought the world ‘infinitely more dangerous now’ because those same weapons still existed, yet they were now more powerful, and they were also considerably more vulnerable than they’d ever been compared to those former times. Anything could very easily happen these days, he said. He was perhaps referring to global threats from terrorism arising from people with deluded ideological agendas, but he was (perhaps understandably) non-committal on pertinent questions concerning Russia’s current leadership when asked in such a context.

 

By Morten Morland (The Sunday Times)

Gorbachev was right, though. Of late the world has seemingly been increasingly poised, only a knife edge away from the utterly irrational impinging upon the everyday, as the events of 9/11 clearly taught us – anything really can happen. So many strange and previously unthinkable things have occurred in our recent times – think of the storming of the US Capitol only a year or so ago. Anarchy lies just the other side of this thin curtain called reality which we draw around ourselves and our societies. Only a week ago the people of Ukraine were living their lives like the rest of us – going to work, going to school, walking the dog, riding trains, commuting to work, going shopping, driving cars, listening to music, watching TV, eating dinner, doing all the normal things people and families do in a sane and stable world, but now they have been utterly uprooted. The elderly and those with young children fleeing from harm’s way are now refugees, while those who have stayed or are returning to fight and resist the invader are all in mortal danger. It seems so utterly unimaginable.

 

Simple misinformation, as well as active disinformation, threaten our understanding of what is going on and could so easily help to spin things out of control due to the current credulous nature of unfiltered news and opinion, much like Orson Welles’ infamously all-too-realistic radio broadcast of War of the Worlds in 1938. We’ve no idea of what Vladimir Putin is capable of doing. We watch dumbfounded, in fear and aghast at the devastation he has unleashed upon the poor people of Ukraine. Ordinary people, like those the world over, whose lives were much the same as yours and mine only a week ago. We watch in horror. We watch feeling powerless. We witness the inhumanity. And I can’t help reflecting how those fictional three-legged machines with their heat rays stalking the Surrey countryside, burning up the streets and villages for no sensible reason no longer seem quite so alien or extraordinary now. It could so easily be anyone of us, any of our own hometowns. We’ve long watched passively as this sort of thing has happened in other places both near and far, and those who have tried to protest or warn of this kind of thing have simply been ignored by those who have the real power to do something meaningful and just about it – but somehow this time it is different. This time it could very well be a moment of epochal change, as if we’ve not already had enough of those arising in this increasingly deracinated and deeply tarnished new century.

 

Something is deeply wrong with the way our world operates. In H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds it was the smallest and seemingly the most inconsequential of organisms which eventually managed to overthrow the madness of the inhuman aggression which confronted the world, perhaps now it will be the right thoughts and right actions of all of us, no matter how small or individual we are, which can only be magnified if we band together and oppose the tyrannies of those who would have us living unquestioningly and according to their terms only, using our fears as the source of their strength and personal profits. Now is the wake-up call, telling us it is high time for us to shake off our apathy and our atomisation. Vaclav Havel called this social philosophy ‘Living in Truth.’ It’s worked in the past and it can work again if we stand strong, work together and will it to do so. We only have one world, and we clearly need greater and more inclusive unity in order to make it a better place. Whatever the outcome of this unpardonable act of aggression against Ukraine eventually is, it seems clear that our world will need to change not just accordingly, but hopefully radically, and radically for the better, in the wake of this present emergency. But that will depend on all of us doing what is right, and by all of us no longer allowing those who do wrong by others to get away with it.

Slava Ukraini! 

'Peace' by Waldemar Walczak

NB - At the time of posting (2022): I've not been able to find out who the artist is who created the two illustrations used above (of the three-legged Martian machines attacking London and being faced down by the 'Thunder Child') - I sourced them from GoodReads, but if anyone knows please let me know and I'll credit them properly. UPDATE (2024): I've now found out that the artist is Robert Czarny (c.2005-2006).

Andrei Makine - An Homage to Lost Time

I first discovered the writer Andreï Makine in the pages of the TLS in 2000. It was a review of his novel, Once Upon the River Love. I remember the review intrigued me so much that I went straight to one of the big bookshops on London’s Charing Cross Road (Books, etc. – sadly now long gone) where I found and bought a copy. Just reading the first page I sensed there was something special about the way these words were crafted (and so ably translated, as are all Makine’s books, by Geoffrey Strachan). I was hooked. I went on to read his subsequent books, almost keeping pace at first, as each was translated into English. I began to see how certain themes recur in his novels. These seemed to give hints and clues, suggestive of the author’s own background. Indeed, Makine’s own story is as intriguing as his plotlines. Over the years, the interviews with him which I’ve read in newspapers and magazines tend to give very scant detail about this author and his life – reading them, it’s almost as if he is one of his own characters, so deftly yet sparingly sketched out. A loose yet fluid set of lines, roughing out the suggestion of a figure, lightly delineated on a blank white page. A form upon which we can overlay the contours of a character. Indeed, it seems all too easy for us to project something of our own imaginations as readers, conjuring up the picture of a man as exile, as a writer, as an artist.

The fact’s state: he was born in the USSR, in Krasnoyarsk in 1957. He was allowed by the Soviet authorities to come to Paris in 1987 as part of a teacher’s exchange programme, where – despite the thawing of the Cold War – he defected to the West. He was granted asylum. Lived rough for a while, including two weeks living in a cemetery. He settled in Paris, and has lived there ever since. Absolutely committed to a writer’s life. His major breakthrough came with the publication of his novel, Le Testament Français, in 1995. A novel which achieved the unprecedented feat of winning both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis, as well as the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens. Writing in French prose so finely crafted he had to claim his books were translations from Russian originals in order to persuade his publishers that he’d actually written them himself. Before coming to France, in the Soviet Union he’d been a teacher. He’d also served in the Red Army, tank corps; posted to conflict zones in Angola and Afghanistan. He was an orphan, raised by his grandmother. Makine may well even be an adopted name; the grandmother perhaps not his grandmother after all. Such are the sketchy details, the bare bones of possible facts which seem to beg for elaboration. Facts that suggest so many questions, but how to sift through such layers so lightly laid down – they seem so thin, almost opaque, like the thin leaves of the thinnest onion-skin Bible paper. Not so much the whole truth, but rather nothing of the truth at all? – Less of a life’s testament than a palimpsest of speculation. Questions and echoes.

But perhaps the facts are all there? – Hiding in plain sight. After all, the themes which recur most frequently across his novels seem to echo those bare facts known of the author’s life. The grandmother who speaks French. Looking down the barrel of a tank gun in a conflict zone. An exiled writer seeking to reconnect with the past. Familiar tropes indeed. Albeit refracted in myriad ways which make the truth even harder to pin down. But then that’s the essence of all his stories right there. It’s not so much about the truth as more about the feeling. The reckoning with an unfathomable past. How the individual is lost in the immensity of history. Engulfed and overwhelmed, yet somehow surviving. Bobbing back up to the surface. Constantly. Carried along by the tidal flow of time and events. And eventually set down on the wayside of history to think, ponder and reflect on all of it. What it means, what matters, and, moreover, what doesn’t matter at all. Life isn’t lived in the details of history, but rather that’s where a life is lost. It’s only in the present resurfacing that through recollection some sort of sense can be made of it all. But even then, all those certainties unfathomed and arrived at can all be swept away again in the merest blink of an instant. After which, once emerged again; shot out from the other side of the welter, can we begin to recalibrate, realign, reset and remember from a different vantage point. Life is fluid. Unchanging in its ceaseless changeability. Like Heraclitus’ river.

Makine is often compared to other writers: To Proust. Tolstoy. Bonin. Chekov. Balzac. Stendal. Solzhenitsyn. But I tend to think this is simply a lazy journalistic take. He’s Russian; he writes in French. Perhaps at best though such comparisons are a means to attempt to signpost him, pointing as definitively as possible in the direction of truly great literature. The grand tradition of the Great Russian novel. A la recherché … and all that. Which is fine by me. I think Makine is probably one of our greatest living writers. But I think in time he will come to be seen as standing amidst this august company on his own terms. For the distinctiveness of his own voice and for the themes he chooses to explore and unpick that most clearly characterise our own era. In that sense I genuinely think he is one of the foremost writers of our times. And I say this because he captures our present preoccupation with the past so well. Such that he is capturing not just the zeitgeist of the present, but that he is doing so in a way which is refracting even within the rapidly changing nature of our times. When I began reading his works there was a sense of nostalgia mixed with a fascination for the incomprehensible. As a child growing up in the 1980s, at the tail end of the Cold War (not that we really knew it was the tail end at the time), the Second World War still didn’t seem all that long ago. It was still a living memory, as was the First World War even. But the world I knew, the world I was growing up in, seemed utterly removed from those two calamitous eras. Life was now infinitely better and improved. There was still a looming existential threat, nuclear holocaust and mutually assured destruction; but it all seemed so very far away. And as the thaw set in with the era of Glasnost and Perestroika everything seemed to be heading in the right direction. The end of the decade only confirmed it. The Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution (overlooking the inconvenient anomalies of Tiananmen Square and the former Yugoslavia) – the 1990s now seem like halcyon days, all taken so much for granted. Requiem for the East bridges this divide perfectly, yet it also manages to highlight the undercurrents which persist (largely unseen but there in plain sight) into the present day.

Now though such things are getting harder not to see. It feels like we’re stuck in a deracinating chaos of rising nationalism, xenophobia, gameshow politicians summoning up goose-stepping delusions towards a nostalgia for broken empires and far flung wars, domestic terrorism, austerity, minimum living wages, zero-hours contracts, food banks, gold-plated elevators, expense claim scandals relating to superfluous second homes with pay-as-you-go pornography, duck houses and moats. Brexit as tragedy, farce and folly. Remembrance Day charity campaigns in which children wearing T-shirts with the slogan “Future Soldier” emblazoned across the front parade holding giant plastic red poppies – Lest we Forget, and, Never Again … Lions led by Donkeys; twas ever thus, and, so it seems, still it is. Hollow words parroted for unthinking times. Hidden agendas parodied into reality. “Fake News” fabricating a new set of Emperor’s clothes to distract from a corrupt and greedy global system which somehow manages to sustain itself as one economy after another tanks itself. Third World Debt. First World Guilt. Climate Change Denial. We’re not waving, we’re drowning in the largest gyre of plastic waste ever recorded choking the oceans and being ingested in the very food we all eat and the water we drink. What the hell has happened to all our bright tomorrows? That happy future heralded by the chants of ‘Freiheit’ – ‘Freedom’ and the ‘wind of change’ which we heard sung of so loudly and optimistically in the 1990s? – Makine himself has spoken out against these First World delusions and the duplicity underlying them in perhaps the most public forum he could, when being inducted into the Académie Française in 2016.

When I first began reading Andreï Makine’s novels they appealed to me because I simply couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to live through the horrors and deprivations of the two World Wars. What it must have been like to lead a life defined by duty and self-sacrifice. Even though I’d heard my grandparents telling their life stories, describing what it was really like. I could never properly picture what it would have been like had I had to live through it. The UK is unhealthily obsessed with this period – we were taught about it over and over at school, it’s on our television screens every night, either in documentaries (Dan Snow, Dan Snow, and more Dan Snow…), or sit-coms (think Dad’s Army, Allo Allo, Goodnight Sweetheart, etc.) – and this has been a constant since I was a child. Our Finest Hour. Never to be forgotten. And don’t you forget it! … But likewise, as a child of the Cold War, I was fascinated by what life might be like had I lived on the other side of the Iron Curtain. I vividly remember watching the parades of Soviet missile transporters passing through Moscow shown on the TV News. It was both chilling and beguiling. I later got a taste of what it might have been like when I stayed with a family in East Berlin in 1993. Makine’s novels give a window into that lost world of fear, labour camps, the KGB and Joseph Stalin forever looking over your shoulder and listening in on you. Of loyalties betrayed. The many veils of idealism and ideology. Naivety met by the bluntness suddenly emerging from the shadowy fog of reality. The deep lacerations of individual lives coerced, distorted, twisted and broken as so deftly described in A Hero’s Daughter.

His novels are often stories within stories. Not so much Russian dolls, but rather that strangely displaced schism of the mind – the here and now attempting to comprehend and contend with the past and its echoes. His novels always manage to expertly explore the place of the solitary human within that wider history, of the individual within that vast inhuman machinery of the State, and of States at war. Yet within this giant whirligig of time he manages to find small but universal anchors in the form of love, music, personal connection, links which lead ultimately to some form of redemption or reparation. The Life of an Unknown Man captures this perfectly. His novels can seem outwardly bleak but losing yourself within the sonorous nature of Makine’s prose they become transformative, and they somehow always manage to end on a profound note of hope and optimism. Nihilism has its silver linings. No matter how bad things become in the end the individual holds true. Hope shines through. Time is lost, but time is also regained even if it is reshaped – time and its recall remould us, reader and character, anew. This is the process and the point of indulging in or undertaking such strenuous meditations on the past. Experiencing the emotions of people other than ourselves. We know nothing if we don’t know what empathy truly is.

In that sense all Makine’s books are an homage to the indomitable spirit of ordinary souls who manage to remain unbroken by the malicious intent of the collective machine. The essential soul of all his characters ultimately survive and emerge unscathed. They represent a poetic homage to hope as the essential element of the human condition. And I hope, reading Makine, particularly in these troubled times; I hope that his books prove to be prescient and right. I still believe in that indomitable spirit of revolution which marked my teenage years so indelibly in the early 1990s – hence I hope our here and now is simply the story within a story that I will one day tell to my niece and nephews, and them to their children someday too. When the bright new tomorrows have eventually returned.