Too little too late

It's a cliché to say every cloud has a silver lining, and readers will find themselves searching for a strand of luster within Anna Porter's The Ghosts of Europe. Unfortunately, in its stead stands yet another cliché: the book itself.

As the almost satirically spectral title seeks to suggest, this book is about the often unfortunate historical events that unfolded in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary in the 20th century. And while the subtitle promises insight into the region's "uncertain future," the text is largely a recounting of the phenomena of 1989 with a sprinkling of references to the horrors of the Holocaust.   

Porter is clearly passionate about her chosen subject, as she and her family fled Hungary in 1956, but one might call her passionate to the point of distraction.

In a passage about one of the true dissident of dissidents, Poland's Adam Michnik, Porter refers to Michnik's desire to see contemporary society move forward from this ostensibly haunted history.

"While I admire Michnik's argument," she writes, "I am with those who wish to see justice done. Historians come too late to provide even a whiff of fairness for those who fought for democracy, suffered violent reprisals and now watch their former jailers drive expensive cars."

Does Porter not realize the mythical person she describes is Michnik? Is she equating her capacity to judge (as one who left the region as a child and spent the past 50 years in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Canada) with his (a resident Pole jailed by the totalitarian regime)?

Porter, for good measure, throws in the occasional awkward, two-decade late jibe at Russia, referring to for example, "Putin's politics and probable expansionist plans." This lends the book the vengeful voice of a narrator who overcompensates for her temporal and physical distance from historical events through rhetorical retribution.

Perhaps the text's most unfortunate portions are those in which Porter attempts to place her observations in a larger geopolitical context.

In the introduction, she writes that NATO's "original boast that an attack against one of its members is an attack on all has foundered on its role in Iraq, Afghanistan and on its cautious response to Russia's invasion of Georgia." Opinions on the present relevance of NATO aside, the alliance is not and never was engaged in Iraq, did activate the Article 5 of its charter that Porter refers to after the 9/11 attacks on the United States and did not do so in the case of Georgia because Georgia is not a member of NATO.

A few pages later, Porter refers to the European Union as having "close to 500 million people, a constitution and a relatively new presidency with some defined powers." But as voters in the Netherlands and France who rejected the 2005 document know, the EU does not have a constitution.

And the blunders continue when it comes to details about Porter's chosen subject: Central Europe. In a chapter on the Czech Republic, she refers to the country's currency as the "krona," which would only be an accurate term if she were writing on Sweden, Iceland or the Faroe Islands.

When describing the record-keeping of the Polish secret police, she writes: "The autocracy could trust no one." But autocracy is a form of government where a single person has near-total power. Save for Stalin at his worst, few of the 20th-century communist regimes can be considered autocratic, as it was the communist parties and their massive bureaucracies that dominated these societies.

In addition to factual and oratorical miscues, Porter always stops short of asking questions that could produce something like new insight. In the midst of recounting conversations with Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Polish general who instituted martial law in 1981 and led the country until 1989, she writes: "He does not mention that, as an enthusiastic cadre in the Polish section of the Red Army, he watched the destruction of Warsaw in 1944."

But isn't it Porter's job, as the interviewer, to ask Jaruzelski about this?

Some of Porter's vignettes might make for a fair magazine article, but one expects more from books, including sophistication and purpose. The Ghosts of Europe largely amounts to a trip down memory lane with former dissidents, but executed less insightfully than has been done already, and a decade or so late.

The missteps in this book are numerous, but the biggest of all is that Porter has tried to write a post-communist book about a post-post-communist era.

Benjamin Cunningham can be reached at
bcunningham@praguepost.com