The action of this novel takes place during the summer and autumn of 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Felix Hoffman, a diplomatic liability of Jewish parentage and with a liking for neither side in the Cold War, has been posted as Dutch Ambassador to Czechoslovakia. He had survived the Nazis by hiding out in a pig farm. No scholar himself, he had married an expert on Renaissance Dutch Literature. Of his two daughters, one died young of leukaemia, one turned junkie and died of an overdose. This put an end to his married happiness and his sleep. Felix spends much of the novel nursing a death wish and feeling guilty for surviving. Then he falls for a Czech double agent who blows the whistle on his treachery when she defects to the West. It is the Velvet Revolution in Prague that saves him; the affair is hushed up and, reconciled with his wife, Hoffman resolves to see in the new millennium and the last of an unpleasant century.


If it’s an old-fashioned spy thriller you’re after, full of reassuring stereotypes and clichés, then this is the book for you. A script-writer and film producer, the author later made writing bestsellers his sideline. This kind of book is supposedly constructed on the formula of ‘a bit of sex, a bit of mystery, a bit of religion, a bit of aristocracy’. But here De Winter rings a few changes. There’s nothing wrong with the sex or the mystery, but for aristocracy and religion we have to make do with a diplomat who takes it into his head to read Spinoza during his sleepless nights. The author is noted for drawing his characters ‘larger than life’ and in this novel gives us a couple of champion over-eaters: Hoffman himself and an archetypal American. In addition there is the obligatory CIA agent (ironically named Marks, just say it in your head), a paranoid who always wears gloves because he cannot bear contact with the world. In fact most of the characters give the impression of not feeling at home on the planet. Their strategies for getting by are counterpointed by Spinoza’s not altogether helpful suggestions and the conclusion seems to be that that there’s not much difference in practicality between them.

The Kingdom’s standard fluttered from the bonnet of the car. Earlier that day Hoffman had read a report on human rights in Czechoslovakia, to be sent to the Hague over his signature. The main task that had been assigned to him in Prague was to provide support for dissidents, a gimmick thought up by the coterie of ‘spokespersons’ at the Dutch Foreign Ministry. In fact no one in The Hague, himself included, gave a damn for the dissidents, but the minister knew he could score points in the chamber with exaggerated tributes to muddled humanists and disillusioned communists. The Western press had a soft spot for dissidents, because dissidents were in fact not dissimilar to journalists: confined to the sidelines of politics, convinced at all times that right was on their side, but reduced to silence by a mob of politicians. Journalists, sad creatures who had elevated their rancour into a profession, had no trouble in identifying themselves with these malcontents.

In the Netherlands, too, dissidents abounded, but there they were dismissed as troublemakers. In Eastern Europe things were different. With few exceptions (for instance Sakharov, innocence personified) most Eastern bloc dissidents had been looked on as deeply pious heroes, prevented from attending church and dreaming of a Europe under the leadership of the Pope. Hoffman was thinking of the Poles in particular, people who had stopped working, brought their country to the brink of economic ruin, and were now able to spend all day on their bended knees in church imploring the Blessed Virgin for better times.

A troublemaker born in Eastern Europe was a dissident to the West. Thus a semi-literate wretch who could just about write THE CAT SAT ON THE MAT and had the good fortune to be confined to a Gulag labour camp, could find himself published in Munich or Paris as ‘a leading dissident author of experimental texts’. (p. 182-3, tr. Arnold & Erica Pomerans)