From the Valley of the Clueless to The Valley of Unknowing

One of my favourite bookshops in London is a small corner of peaceful civilization close to Gloucester Road tube station, and not far from one of those fascinating old-fashioned hardware stores which stretch into dark back rooms and seem to sell everything. I’m never quite sure how such things survive in central London, which is increasingly a millionaire city, but they do.  It is one of those rather smart second-hand shops which are far from cheap and which also sell some new books, but which are far, far more interesting than ordinary shops which sell only new books.

There are three reasons to go to a bookshop. One, to browse for its own sake, a pleasure in itself. Two, to buy a specific book (increasingly difficult, unless the book is very current) . Three,  for serendipity, the joy of finding a wholly unexpected volume you didn’t even know you wanted and in some cases didn’t even know existed.

 

Anyway, my visit to this shop (I hadn’t been for some months) was of the third kind. And it was a bookshop encounter of the third kind, almost as if the book had been quietly calling me from a mile away. I had somehow never even heard of ‘The Valley of Unknowing’ by Philip Sington.  But as soon as I saw it I knew it was for me. The cover shows a black and white photograph of tramlines curving down a bald, harsh-street – suggesting immediately a scene from Communist Eastern Europe, as I still recall it.

 

And then there was the title, which also awoke a memory of the old East German expression ‘Valley of the Clueless’ (Tal der Ahnungslosen) used by those within easy range of West German TV transmitters, to refer to (and mock)the residents of Dresden and  the Elbe valley who could only receive the lies and propaganda of East German TV.  Actually, this is one of the most interesting and paradoxical sidelights of Communist history because ( as I heard at the time and as is recorded on page 499 of Tony Judt’s book ‘Postwar’ , so it must be true), the East German state eventually ran a cable down to Dresden to pipe West German TV to the residents there. They did this because they had long ago given up trying to stop their citizens watching Western TV , and because it was getting harder and harder to get well-qualified and educated citizens to take up posts in Dresden, because it would mean living in the Valley of the Clueless.  

 

Anyway, Dresden is the setting for this extraordinary, sometimes very funny,  and extremely evocative book, which is also so powerfully captivating that I managed to read it on a train so badly delayed that I would normally have been fuming and spluttering with rage.  The story is so good that I forgot that I was an hour late. The central character is simultaneously a plumber and a decorated author of a socialist-realist popular classic which has given him protected status in the East, and enough of an income from Western sales to sweeten his life in the German Democratic Republic (or 'Workers’ and Peasants’ State', as he usually refers to it, also ‘Actually Existing Socialism’, both terms used by the government of that country, which grow funnier the more they are repeated).

 

For good reasons (which you will find out if you read the book) Mr Sington has a feel for the absurdities and the sour, yet invigorating flavour of life in a  Communist state, where even the passage of the seasons is different from the West , no transaction is simple, no event safe from fears of betrayal or mistrust or subtle pressure.

 

It is odd that I found this book just as a new book is published about the Zhivago affair (‘The Zhivago Affair: the Kremlin, the CIA and the battle over a Forbidden Book by Peter Finn and Petra Couvee’) , the horrible and stupid Soviet persecution of Boris Pasternak after the western publication of his novel ‘Dr Zhivago’.   For the core of Philip Sington’s story is the publication, in West Germany, of a book written in the East. And what a book it is.  I am frightened here of giving too much away about a very cunning and absorbing plot,, so I can’t and won’t explain much more.  Fundamentally it is a novel (love story included,  with a bit of thriller too) about the corrosion and misery of mistrust, especially the mistrust engendered by a police state. I think it’s the most telling thing published about East Germany since that great film ‘The Lives of Others’ which, while tremendously good, was utterly unrealistic about the likely behaviour of any secret policeman.

 

But in these de-cultured times, there is something almost nostalgic about stories of regimes which genuinely feared the power of words, and which also gave privileges and special status to authors. The old Communist World was a sort of morality play, and those who experienced it know important things about human beings , about power , courage, loyalty and truth which are more or less denied to those who never saw it.  Those of us who did see it were, I hope, able to feel sympathy with those who suffered under it, while observing the riddles and cruel obstacles that beset them.  One does not have to be cold and dispassionate to learn from what one sees. Nor do I think it wrong to accept that, in a very complicated way, some important goodness came out of all that evil. But if you want to have some idea of what it was like, and to trouble yourself with how you might have behaved if you were trapped in such a world, read this book. It is even (rather wittily and touchingly) printed in an East German typeface.