Music At The Garden House - Patricia Le Roy

...learnt to my surprise that Music at the Garden House is the second book of a trilogy called Lenin’s Ghost. The first book, The Angels of Russia, ‘sparked a media storm in 1998 when it became the first e-book ever to be nominated for the Booker Prize’. I’ll look out for the other two books now.

A word on the title: how unsnappy and also misleading. Even after finishing the book I have no idea why the author chose it. For me it suggests ... more

Katherine accompanies her husband Stephen, a political journalist for a British newspaper, when he’s sent to Moscow. There she finds out that he’s interested more in his job than in her, Moscow frightens and bores her and so it doesn’t surprise that she falls for his Russian assistant Axel. A passionate love affair ensues.

Ten years later, back in London. One day Katherine prepares to leave for her cottage in Normandy together with her daughter (Stephen does research work abroad), when suddenly Axel appears, he urges her to take him with her as he’s followed by the KGB. He’s a KGB officer himself but has changed sides, he’s got secret Soviet plans in his possession to sabotage the future reunified Germany and has decided to leak them to a British journalist who he has to meet in Prague.

Katherine helps him indeed, she leaves her daughter with friends in Munich and then travels, or rather flees, with Axel through West Germany, the GDR (German Democratic Republic) and Czechoslovakia to Prague - with the KGB always close to their heels.

On one level the novel is a spy thriller; the Cold War may be officially over but that does not mean that everyone welcomes the new era with open arms, of course. Soviet communist hardliners aren’t any too pleased about the GDR, their most loyal vassal, turning into a democratic state. A man dies, Axel and Katherine change cars, sleep in an abandoned hut in the forest, alter their outward appearance, use faked passports - the ingredients are all there.

On another level the novel is a love story, albeit a tricky one. Although Katherine and Axel haven’t seen each other for ten years, the magic is still there. The problem is, however, that Axel knows everything about Katherine, in fact knew everything about her already before she came to Moscow. He was only officially Stephen‘s assistant but in reality he had been delegated by the KGB to watch over the foreigners and inform his bosses about their every step.

Yet Katherine knows next to nothing about Axel. In Moscow he never talked about his personal life, he gave her some biographical data which she now learns were all false. During their flight he reveals a bit about himself, but whenever she thinks she’s understood him, he adds new information unsettling her again. He’s like an onion with peel below peel, will she ever get to the core?

I find a third level as fascinating as the spy thriller and the love story, if not more so and that’s the setting. I chose the book because I had read that it was set in the period immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I want to know how foreign authors see my fatherland and I must admit that it also gives me pleasure to catch them out at making mistakes. How easy it is to stumble and fall if you research only from abroad. I can’t frame the author, though! It’s absolutely fascinating how she catches the turbulent period of the summer of 1990. She gets the atmosphere and the discussions in West Germany and the GDR right, down to the expressions people used then. Everything is so truthful and genuine as if she had been present herself, hats off!

Occasionally German words are used in the text but English-only readers won’t be puzzled, they’re either explained or so unimportant that they don’t disturb. The story contains a lot of dialogue which is logical as different political opinions are discussed. I like it that there aren’t too many descriptions and when something is described in detail, it serves a cause. For example, when Axel and Katherine enter the flat of a woman in Weimar, one glance round the living room makes it clear that she has the right connections, namely friends in high places, no average citizen of the GDR would have had the opportunity of furnishing their flat in this extravagant way.

Now that I’ve praised the novel, I must mention my complaint. The story is narrated by the two main characters in turns in the first person perspective. Nothing can be said against this technique, it allows the author different points of view which highlight the difficulty of understanding each other. Unfortunately, she isn’t capable of giving Katherine and Axel different voices! Each chapter starts with the name of the character who’s talking, but I read fast and sometimes overlooked the name. When I came to the first ‘I’, it could happen that for some paragraphs I didn’t know who was talking. Had the author used the third person perspective, she would have had to call the protagonists by their names, this would have made the story easier to follow and she could stick to one voice. Pity that the editor didn’t notice this.

I hadn’t heard the name Patricia le Roy (French pronunciation) before; when I researched on the net, I learnt to my surprise that Music at the Garden House is the second book of a trilogy called Lenin’s Ghost. The first book, The Angels of Russia, ‘sparked a media storm in 1998 when it became the first e-book ever to be nominated for the Booker Prize’. I’ll look out for the other two books now.

A word on the title: how unsnappy and also misleading. Even after finishing the book I have no idea why the author chose it. For me it suggests a family saga and romance, subjects you can chase me with. I hope I could convince you that the novel is anything but.

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Piatkus books
352 pages
Obviously out of print, on Amazon Market Place for 0,01p

 

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