LIDIA VIANU

Alan Brownjohn and the Desperado AgeFICTIONTHE LONG SHADOWS OF IMAGINATION AND FEAR

The novel The Long Shadows (1997) is mainly the story of a novel within a novel (Philip Carstons A Time Apart has a breathtaking story and even a translation into Romanian, with its own, complementary adventures). The Way You Tell Them started from an obituary for a writer who died apparently by accident. This novel is about an intention to write a dead novelists biography. Actually, it is Brownjohns version of an imagined, much feared displacement. The British novelist Philip Carston is scared stiff by the prospect of being stranded in a dystopic, Communist Romania, while his friend and translator, Carolina Predeanu, who also becomes (maybe partly becomes, ambiguity reigns) his lover, is scared by England to such an extent that she sees secret agents everywhere and leaves in a few days, giving up the fortnight she had planned. The novel reaches farther than a mere geographical displacement. Actually, it is a spiritual displacement: Philip and Carolina no longer feel at home in their bodies and souls once they have met, they try to stick together, but solitude is their fate. Philip dies, Carolina is almost annihilated by the post-1990 regime in her country, Romania. What is left of all the characters and their fierce struggles is long shadows of doubt, fear, imagination, emptiness. A novelist dies in England, a social order dies in Romania, but life goes on in its devious ways. The king is dead, long live the king. It seems an impossibility to come to know Alan Brownjohn the man when we read his blank poems. They are blank precisely because they hide him so well. Blankness in this case does not mean emptiness, but the idea of a mask for the author. The poet Brownjohn is in hiding. The novelist Brownjohn is not so cautious, and we suddenly feel very close to him. The previous two novels did not reveal so much. His first novel was a revaluation of adolescence, the second was too well planned to leave room for idle confession. The third novel takes its time. We are at last in the presence of a writer who, until 1997, chose to be exasperatingly private. His secrecy is still an obsession, but now we get to understand it. Everything Philip Carston experiences can be associated with the author himself, although we do that at our own risk. Interpreting Alan Brownjohn is a lonely task, but here he helps us more than he may have been aware. An exquisite, perfectly British sensibility and discretion lie at the bottom of The Long Shadows. Aggressive characters teem on every page, Carolina herself is quite harsh if we come to think of it, but the novelist doomed to die (Philip Carston), associated with his biographer-to-be, Tim Harker-Jones, reveals to us tenderness, diffidence, at times ridiculous fears, the shell of love and an exquisite discretion in the way he treats the way of all flesh. Alan Brownjohn, willingly or unwillingly, describes the essence of Britishness at grips with communism. Love dies when the hero dies, but Britishness stays, and The Long Shadows cast by this disquieting love story (though it is far more than that) on the minds of the readers endure. It is a novel that will not easily fall prey to forgetfulness. The characters may be evanescent, but their palpitating story is with us to stay.In a letter, Alan Brownjohn explains thus the title of his novel:The title of The Long Shadows was somewhat arbitrary. A long search for a title culminated in the use of the one suggested by browsing a book of English proverbs, Old sins cast long shadows. The sins in question were those of rgimes as well as individuals, in my mind but the title isnt to be seen as exactly descriptive of the plot.The shadows possibly remind the reader of Heart of Darkness, especially as the motto to the first part of the novel entitled Then, though coming from the novel of a Romanian novelist, Dumitru Radu Popescu, smells strongly of the odour of a river sinking into the jungle of Communist reality:The Danube was taking him down and what was incredible was that the sun was shining red as it was sinking into darkness, and the leaves were rustling, and there, rising, was the moon.Brownjohn is very sensitive to the peculiarities of communist Romania, which he knows from direct experience, and which he describes with the eye of a westerner, but an initiated one, a writer initiated into the dark rites of censorship, terror, the security service. He chooses Romania to be the exotic background of his sensibility, and displaces an English novelist first, then his biographer, plunging them into a totally foreign way of life. He displaces a Romanian translator, too, but she hurries to come back from England, acting upon an impulse that very few born Romanians would understand. Other than the fear of displacement, very Desperado in itself, Carolina has no genuine reason to hurry back home, where she is soon to be even more miserable than before, because the fall of communism does not bring her any relief. On the contrary, it looks as if the eye of the Securitate rendered her a service, making her famous, mysterious and desirable, qualities which she loses after 1990.The narrator, obvious or implicit, of the plot is Tim Harker-Jones, who, in his fifties, wakes up on the first page feeling that on any morning after the age of forty-five you have to be a hero to get up. He has to tell his brain to move, to force his aching, breaking torso into action, but he is determined to catch his plane and find out whatever he can about his recently dead friend, Philip Carston. It is a few weeks after Christmas. The mysterious destination is actually an attempt of the novelists in the novel, as well as of Brownjohn the novelist, to suggest the possibility of a dystopia, a place where everything is the negative version of what we would like to experience.Philip Carston placed his last book in an unnamed, fictitious country. He also expressed the wish to have his biography written by his friend Harker-Jones, distinguished biographer. The novel we read is supposed to be that biography but not literally so. It is the nearest thing to a biography of this fictitious writer, a third person narrative, aiming at psychological analysis, which is a feebler presence than the delight in secrets, Philips secrets, the dark secrets of communism more than that. If Philips dystopia did not have precise geographical coordinates, his biographer plainly talks about Romania, in an attempt at deciphering the experiences of his dead friend and his love affair with Carolina Predeanu. Brownjohn deciphers communist realities with remarkable inside knowledge, but his experience is not behind it totally. He has been shocked by what Orwell was shocked by in 1984, or Bradbury in Rates of Exchange, or Burgess in Honey for the Bears, but he retells everything as an outsider, so it is a smart move on his part to use the biographer as a mediator, an oblique point of view, like Conrads Marlow or Henry James more numerous witnesses. The Long Shadows is an indirect description of a dystopic Bucharest and a pseudonymous provincial city, which aim at becoming prototypes of the communist city.Brownjohn mentions issues that shocked western papers and aroused international abuse, such as the destruction of historic monuments, churches, whole villages. A character calls the reconstruction of the old city of Bucharest an act of socialist vandalism, which it most certainly was. The people the biographer meets, from his guide and interpreter (Angela Cernec) to various characters he meets officially or unofficially, are woven together by a common plot, but the text protects their privacy, we never learn their innermost thoughts. As a poet, Brownjohn is private. As a novelist, he is very reticent to unveil. The whole book is pervaded by the fear of the rgime, of its security system. Everybody is suspected to be part of a national scheme of spying, no character is rescued from this degrading suspicion, not even the beautiful Carolina, not even the British citizen Philip Carston. Spying is a dystopic feature that kills privacy and Brownjohn himself is terrified by the prospect. His readers share his anxiety as he recomposes the body of Romania as a negative utopia, defamiliarizing it and throwing it into the abyss of hopelessness, because in the end we no longer know the truth and feel we are sinking in a very unreliable world.Harker-Jones feels he has landed in a sinister place. He was warned by his compatriots that he should be cautious with everything, from local beautiful women to the Securitate. Actually, he was told everything was Securitate. He wonders: were Romanians onto him already, an hour after he had settled into the hotel? Brownjohn alternates his own narrative about Harker-Jones with chapters from Carstons novel, in which he describes a young Katrin, who comes to England and falls in love with an Englishman. It is Carstons version of Carolina, and it is slowly compared to Carolinas confessions, that come much later. Their love affair appears rather cold and unconvincing, because of the Desperado refusal to commiserate, to share, to become involved into anything too personal. The Desperado character is a being all on his or her own. Alan Brownjohn comments on this in the following way: I deliberately kept the extent of the love affair secret. (I personally believe that the affair was probably consummated on one of Philips later visits to Romania!)Katrin, the heroine of the novel within the novel, comes to England from a dystopia viewed with irony, while Carolina, the heroine of the real novel, the real version of Katrin, experiences a dystopia put into practice, something worse than a nightmare, because this time it is real and inescapable. Carston can afford describing Romanias poverty or Katrins fears with irony, but Brownjohn is far more respectful. He has come to know the nightmare and this is where he breaks his Desperado shell: unable to ridicule the absurdity of the system, he chooses to relate its effects on people, the way human beings are ultimately dehumanized, left like limp puppets when the show ends. The plot is alert and only apparently omniscient. Actually, Brownjohn subtly adapts the inheritance of the stream of consciousness to his Desperado tricks of recuperating the logical, breathtaking narration. He debunks two contemporary myths, similar to Jamess Americans and Europeans: he describes the Westerner in the East and the communist in the West. Both feel utterly displaced and are grimly dystopic because of their displacement, of their constantly feeling ill-at-ease in unfamiliar surroundings, menaced by alien beings almost.The plot abounds in parallelisms and uses of a deus-ex-machina. There is a Romanian biographer, too (Mr. Ioan Ludache), Carolina herself provides part of the English novel and is suspected for a long time of having written the whole, Brownjohn looks over Carstons shoulder when he imparts his understanding of dystopic Romania. In this way, characters overlap, everyone is at the same time the hunter and the hunted. The motto to the first part actually comes from a novel entitled The Royal Hunt.Romanian life in the last two decades of communism is accurately outlined. Queues, bare food stores, industrial suburbs, present and retired party activists with privileges, shortage of food and provisions that are more precious than gold, in short, a life which appreciates small things, because the important ones are forbidden or denied. All positive heroes build their own secluded refuge far from the madding crowd, wherein they think and do what the vigilant eye of the Securitate and all state or party officials frown upon. There is inner freedom, in spite of the general scaring terror. Tim Harker-Jones is not aware of the islands inside everyone, and consequently feels trapped, even scared. In a country where all decisions, to the least of actions, are political, the English biographers going to Trgu Alb in order to meet Carolina Predeanu, Philip Carstons translator into Romanian, and most likely his mistress, since the Romanian book was printed almost simultaneously with the English one, so she must have had a manuscript, is a feat of courage and deviousness on the part of his guide. Small daring gestures go a long way. Just like the long shadows.Brownjohn, like all outsiders, is extremely attracted by dissidence. Harker-Jones is on the look out for dissident writers and worships any sign of disobedience to the system. Yet, Philip Carston describes Katrins rather rudimentary psychology quite humourlessly, which makes Carolinas literary double pretty boring and unreal. She asks her English relatives, What is your purpose in life in England?, What is the meaning in your lives in England? The answer is a request: tell us about the freedom or the oppression in your own country. Flat statements without any mystery, which are fortunately followed by the enigmatical description of the beautiful translators real life, her hidden revolt, all the more pathetic since her dissidence is not spectacular, but daily and indomitable.Most characters are ambivalent. They may appear dissidents, but at some point in their lives they are also shown as enrolled in the Securitate. Professor Bobolescu is such an example of ambiguity, which bewilders both writer and reader. He invites the English biographer to his house, treats him to a royal dinner, and later on the biographer is told that professor Bobolescus son, Virgil, who had been filming them all along, always shows his images to the Police. It is only a theory, someones version of reality, but still... Nobody is safe. Philip Carston himself is suspected by Carolina and by the Romanian state, as it seems, of being a spy. The political terror is maybe smaller than the maddening fear of the spy next door, of the friendly witness who always turns you in. Human relationships are ruined, and this essential aspect of life in communism, this solitude caused by a hideous political system is masterfully suggested by Brownjohn. Loneliness becomes in his book a precious gem, which everyone polishes in his most secret inner sanctuary. Just like the poet Brownjohn, the novelist rejects noisy revelations and shyly withdraws into the heaven of privacy.Philip Carstons book in Carolina Predeanus translation has been sold in a hundred thousand copies and read avidly. People queue to buy books in Bucharest, which is an unbelievable dream come true to Carstons biographer. Novelists, translators, biographers, poets, all have an extraordinary halo of popularity. They are genuinely liked, worshipped almost. Carolina herself enjoyed this general sympathy and respect until the fall of communism, when she suddenly loses her mystery and status. She becomes uninteresting, suspicious, whimsical and shallow. She tells Tim that her best friend, Valeria Ciudea, editor of her translation, who had helped her meet Carston secretly by offering them her own house, had been an informer all along. After 1990, Carolina will not even talk to her, and, in a strange way, she turns to people whom the reader would have thought to be pillars of the Securitate formerly. Utterly confused, the only thing Tim can go by is his instinct:...the feeling he had from Romania was predominantly one of being back at school. At a place where there were several levels of authority that could arbitrarily restrict and punish you, from the headmaster downwards: the masters, the prefects, the fifth and fourth form bullies whom the official authorities never seemed to restrain. And all the apparatus of rules, the arbitrary punishments (the detentions), the thefts and punches and insults never righted, all of it going on for the eternity that you lived until you were old enough to rise above it...The powerlessness the English biographer connects with childhood is in Ceausescus Romania a general feeling. Most people are still like children who never grow old enough to struggle free from the political terror. The rgime breeds victims and bullies, whom Brownjohn carefully watches from the safe distance of the outsider. Yet, at times, here and there, he warms up to some memory of time past, some direct experience of this country contaminated by the plague, yet appealing in a sick way, and he allows the atmosphere, even the humans, to be charming and appealing for brief intervals, a page or two.Brownjohn finds a key image for the common Romanian under Ceausescu: the pedestrian carrying an empty plastic bag. The eternal buyer who hopes to find something to eat and deposit it like an ant in his small kitchen. Besides being hungry, that man is also afraid. The picture is thus complete. His hero, biographer of a dead novelist, third in the row of writers if we include Brownjohn in the line, too, completes the image:Tim felt as if he was on a progress through a haunted house at a fairground: every turn and corner promised a shock, and the floor would all at once shake and lurch under your feet; though in the end you actually learned to expect something new and shocking all the time and were scarcely surprised by anything at all. And Ludache, Valeria Ciudea, the Bobolescus, the strange Mrs. Vajna, Carolina herself and now Ilie Radin -- seemed to be inhabitants of the same haunted mansion, with close knowledge of each other.Tim hopes Carolina can help him with Philips mysterious existence since 1977, when the two met. She does not tell him much when he goes to her provincial town, but summons him to meet her at the best Bucharest restaurant, and, seated with her there, Tim is waiting for a full confession:Tim had the impression that whoever dined here pretended for a couple of hours that this was normal, that the city outside the frosted windows (you could not see the street from inside the Capsa), with the queues you normally had to join for bread or milk or the merest scraps of meat, was the nightmare from which this was a two-hour waking.Carolina begins by talking about her faculty years and her friend Valeria, daughter of a high official at the Council for Culture and Socialist Education in Bucharest, which makes the latter a privileged being and explains her good job as an editor, a position not easy to come by. Actually, Carolina herself is an editor, in Trgu Alb. She was Philips translator when the latter visited Romania, after the big 1977 earthquake, which had had tragic consequences. He was the first English person I had ever met, from a different universe altogether. We have in this novel the authors voice, the voice of Carston in his own novel within the main novel, and now Carolinas own voice, in the first person, narrating each a segment of the story. The least credible, most artificially dramatic and insufficient as information is Carolinas. She remains an enigma to the very end. In Philips novel, as Katrin, she has a diary, which is a frequent Desperado trip into privacy, and she uses it in order to fight against the arrival of the future:To keep the experience of loving Richard Hendleton and his loving her luminous and compelling, she needed to keep Richard vague and shadowy when she wrote him down...Which Carolina does to perfection. She keeps everything vague and Tim keeps waiting for the one truth he needs: were the two lovers? It turns out in the end that there is no knowing more than Carolina will say and she will not confess to that. In the meanwhile, someone prompts Tim to see in her a tragic figure of the real author of Carstons novel (Professor Bobolescu), or, quite the reverse, someone who lives on romantic inventions, who has invented a romantic legend to make herself immortal (Ludache). Ludache tells Tim something true for everyone in Romania: In my country... we know about fear. I am saying, he declared, was Mr. Carston equally in love with her? Or was he not in love with her, and was she deluding herself? Performing the fiction, to lighten her life and make herself interesting in this grey country of ours? The ambiguity Brownjohn preserves to the bitter end has a double function. First, it makes the book intriguing, an open mystery, left helplessly at the mercy of every reader who wants to contribute interpretation. The second function is the authors poetic refuge from the finality of prose. Brownjohn mixes here the devices of novel writing with the blankness of his enigmatical poems, the shyness of his poetic withdrawal. He mixes literary genres, resorting to the hybridization of genres as a refuge. Both refuges, in poetry and in ambiguity, are Desperado attempts, which makes his novel an emblematic work at the turn of the millennium.For a short while, on his way to Valerias house, where he is to meet Carolina illicitly, Tim thinks he is followed and muses: Now he felt incriminated, experienced a guilty fear and pity for the people he was visiting, believed also that the purpose of his trip to Valerias house was already defeated. He would never have the audacity to turn into the street and find the house and knock at the door while his pursuer was in sight. Surely he would have to turn back.The Long Shadows is a defeated book, indeed. It is defeated by its own Desperado tricks, and its very aim is to send a message of defeat to the reader who expects a book to be the perfect mirror. Brownjohn offers us a handful of haze, and his tantalizing offer of an uncertain plot and an uncertain mood, even an uncertain author, since the voices all mix into confusion in the end, has us in thrall, just like La Belle Dame sans Merci. As Carstons novel describes Katrin:She trusted her memory of him much more than she would have trusted the words she could have used to write down the living man. Words were the victim of the action of time.What Brownjohn does is to make out of Romania the very image of dystopia, to place it more in the readers heart than in the geography of the real world. All through Carolinas story about her affair with Philip, we can infer the communication between fearful communism and free capitalism. Two systems meet. Philip is scared and feels displaced, she feels the same when she comes to visit him in England, which she leaves in a hurry, out of the same fear of displacement. There is only one dystopia, the image of Romania, though. Into that, both heroes plunge in a very picturesque way, making the best of decorously impressive interdictions. The characters Tim meets on his trip in the footsteps of the novelist he is writing about are a web of typically Romanian he seems to think affairs (Eva Vajna with professor Bobolescu, Carolina with Tamasi Ilosz), politically deformed actions (the informer Radin, all Carolinas friends, such as Ioana Guranu, it would seem, Carolina herself maybe). Even books have to be scrutinized and peeled of their corrupted crust: you have to read between the lines. This is what Tim Harker-Jones has to do with Carolinas first-person narrative about Philip and herself, since she is determined not to get down to essentials. She talks about feelings at best, but she will not go farther than that. Besides suspected feelings, she also mentions specific infatuations, like professor Liviu Bobolescus three major protgJs, his wife (an ex-cook who keeps excellent house), Eva Vajna and finally, Carolina Predeanu:Professor Liviu Bobolescu had impulsively decided to cast aside the hopeless task of championing Eva Vajnas romantic novels, and transfer all his cunning energies into cultivating me.In this stifling atmosphere of mistrust and menace, Philip returns three years after his first visit, several very occasional letters to Carolina, three cards annually, arriving fastidiously just before the appropriate day, five telephone calls in all. Philips Britishness urges him to call on Carolinas birthday and her name day. It is hard to say from the story Carolina unfurls whether she meant much to Philip she would very much like to think so, but her words are very unconvincing , while Philip means a whole universe to her, the world beyond my own country. Yet she has a lover in the meantime, and does not think of escaping, of leaving her communist country for the capitalist heaven. She is given by the state a small flat of her own, where Tim visits her on the sly after Philips death. Her life is and stays lonely, she is, like all the other characters of all Alan Brownjohns novels, a being defeated by solitude. Brownjohn excels in descriptions of crushing solitude of all kinds: intellectual, emotional, social. His heroes, like his poems, are islands of isolation, of self-defence against the world.The suspicion that Carolina is the author of Philip Carstons novel is started by Bobolescu, who actually prompted her to write herself. Tim is confused: Eva Vajna vehemently opposes the suspicion and tells him so, as an unknown fellow traveller on the train to Trgu Alb. Others mention the halo of writer and lover at the same time, both escaping the dreadful eye of the Securitate. Carolina manages to publish a translation, possibly of her own novel, under an Englishmans name, at an English publishing house and a Romanian one, almost simultaneously. Publication used to be a privilege in Romania. Once Bobolescu leaves Eva Vajna on her own, she can no longer get one page in print. Tim is determined to get to the core of this literary mystery, and finds out that Carolina was not the author of Philips novel, although she did try her hand at writing:I wanted Philip to know that my writing was only and wholly for him. Yes, I was writing to conciliate Professor Bobolescu; but I was writing for Philip Carston. I was using what the Professor liked to call my voice to speak to Philip through the barriers of geography and politics, of physical distance and apartness.After 1977, they meet again in 1980, and Carolina decides to show Philip what she has written. He tells her: ...I am not translatable my language and tone is much too English for that.Feeling so desperately English, Philip is an even easier prey to displacement than Carolina in England. He muses during a conversation:...I have come to a bizarre and frightening country where anything might happen.And many things do happen, some of which are not very plausible. Such is Carolinas awareness that she must be loyal to the Party, at the expense of her relationship with Philip, if the worst comes to the worst. Yet, at the last moment, her convictions change:I believe that at that moment I made an important decision for myself. I was obliged, as a Party member, to reveal any information I received which might relate to activities detrimental to the Party, or denigratory of the Party. In theory I could be punished for not revealing it; though now, in 1980, with President Ceausescu in control of things, it did not seem nearly so serious a possibility as it had been under his predecessor. But that day in Cismigiu Park I suddenly and instinctively defined for myself the boundaries of my loyalty to the Party. I would report, but not inform.The last sentence is more infamous than the author himself must have realized. Carolinas psychology shows insufficient experience of communism, a tendency to be impressed by the picturesque interdictions and to ignore the deep tragedy of the trapped souls. This unavoidable drawback does not prevent Brownjohn, though, from building suspense, an engaging plot, but also not so engaging characters, who are either alone or simplistic, or both, every now and then.The third time Philip comes briefly to visit Romania, it is entirely for one reason: to see Carolina and continue the novel. In Carolinas story, his love looks artificial, hard to understand. He states: I want to finish this before I die.Carston conveniently dies, though, and Tim never manages to find whether the two had been lovers. The voices of the narrative mix, now it is Brownjohn using the third person to describe Tims frustration. The end of Carolinas story is a quotation from Philips last letter, which tells her he is dying and his biography will be written by Harker-Jones. He urges her to tell the man exactly as much as she likes and no more. Carolina does just that, keeping Tim interested to the very end, which is in Philips handwriting, ...I love you to the last. Tim is baffled and enraged, yet looks as English and composed as his predecessor when he was actually facing death. The novel is a feat of decency that no Desperado would achieve. In this respect, it is again an island of its own.The book publisher starts probing Tim for what he knows. Theatre men want to put up a show about Philips life and must absolutely know if he fucked Carolina. Tim is enigmatic, as if he knew the truth. We ourselves never learn it, unless we infer it from Philips quoted pages and from Carolinas confessed love for him. Physicality means nothing in this book, unlike Desperado novels on the whole. From this point of view, Brownjohn is as shy as he is in his poems. Vulgarity is far from being his cup of tea. If he is interested in anything, that is the adventures of sensibility. The whole novel is a long shadow of our souls.As Tim feels he owes it to his book to be sure about what actually happened, he comes to Romania for a second time, soon after the fall of communism. He has to find out if Carolina actually visited England, as several of her compatriots have intimated. As to her having had sex, he answers one of the people who pester him with that question:Carolina the Katrin in Philips novel (...), is still very much alive. She gave me, at great risk, before the revolution, the story of her meetings with Philip and how the idea for the final novel originated. Ive got to be sensitive with her, and discreet.Brownjohns book is a monument of discretion. We get to know people in the best of lights, and when our suspicions are awakened, it always happens because their words and behaviours clash, not because the author, God forbid, might think ill of them. Brownjohn is far from being a gossiping writer. Most of the characters in this novel are still very much alive, and none could take offence at the way the novelist handles them. Tim offers another explanation for his secrecy:Its a much freer country since Christmas, and for that very reason I have to be careful not to misrepresent Carolina in case she sees an opening for the lawyers.Actually, Carolina was anxiously waiting for him after Philips death, as she had been warned he would come, and it looks from the way she acts nothing Tim specifically utters that she very much wants her share of fame, especially after 1990, when her halo of disconsolate lover and enigmatic writer wears away. In a third person narrative this time, we learn how Tim goes to Bucharest in May 1990, hoping to reiterate Philips romantic involvement:He thought of how he would be showing Carolina Predeanu the last chapters of his draft in a hotel bedroom in the same way Philip Carston had shown the manuscript of a novel...The first thing he notices is that Carolina is not at all eager to translate his biography. Not as eager as she had been during the communist years, when she had literally translated at the pace Philip had been writing. But during those dark years people queued for books, which had amazed Tim beyond words. A cultural revolution is taking place. He is shocked to find commercials on TV. Carolina is also different, though he cannot tell why at first:In the time since they had last met, she had completely changed. Then she had worn, each time they met, the clothes in which Philip Carston had dressed Katrin in A Time Apart. Now her clothes were hard, tweedy and formal, severe. At first glance, with her hair taken up, scraped back, leaving her face thin and diminished, the change seemed to have aged her.What has changed is the dramatic aura Carolina used to conjure, as it seems now, willingly, knowing exactly what the effect on Tim would be. She no longer has that power, and not many people see her as the tragic heroine any more. She is now free to write whatever she wants, publish abroad, take any English lover, meet him anywhere, without any fears. Her problem is time, though. Time and tide waits for no man, and she certainly is, looks older. Her myth has aged with her, her friends have deserted her fairy-tale, she appears stranded on an island of enemies. More enemies than during the communist years, fewer friends. Another reason for solitude, and Brownjohn seizes it with delight.Valeria Ciudea, in whose house Carolinas love story with Philip took place most of their time together, is no longer a friend. Carolina is not even on speaking terms with her, but, strangely enough, she embraces Angela Cernec warmly, welcoming her as a true friend. She scrutinizes Tim, who is deeply confused: I think you are my friend? she said, with something like fright and doubt in her eyes, her brow furrowed as she asked. Tim saw that for some reason she sought and needed reassurance.She carries Philips photograph in her bag dramatic gesture, obviously and can count her friends on the fingers of one hand:I have not so many. Ioana Guranu will always be a friend. And it is strange Tamasi Ilosz has been a good friend in these days.Then she calls Philip my dead friend, and Tim my living friend, and informs him that Mrs. Vajna is an enemy. Relationships have turned upside down in a country whose political system is still very much in the dark, in spite of the transition from Ceausescu to Iliescu, a country in which intellectuals demonstrate in University Square, in which communism is being demolished with far more zest than it had been built. Tim becomes slowly aware of the change:She seemed so tensely quiet; he had spent the time in which he had not seen her thinking about a Carolina who had behaved with a luminous assurance which had mostly disappeared. For a specific reason, Carolina is perceived as part of an old, secret nomenklatura, which she tries to explain to Tim, using arguments that might look artificial to a native:I am talking about some Romanian intellectuals. They believe this book to be an attack on Western bourgeois values. Do you understand? I was a member of the Party, I had succeeded in making a big English writer write and publish a novel about the folly of England, and by implication, the virtues of President Ceausescus Romania. I was made a member of the Union of Writers. You understand me? Before the revolution I had some honour for what I did. I had friends. Then it changed.She misrepresents reality slightly and Tim discreetly accepts her version, but we see clearly through her statements. First, Philip Carston wrote his novel out of his own free will, using her as a pretext, not as a main theme, as she had tried to suggest to Tim on his first visit, too. Second, it was not Philip who talked about the folly of England, but the Romanians who needed a pretext to accept the Romanian translation. Philip, on the contrary, talked about his extreme Englishness. The honour and friends she had before the revolutions were moths attracted by the dim light of the world beyond communism. That world is highly accessible after the revolution. Nobody idealizes Carolina any longer, and consequently she feels bereft and betrayed.The present as Carolina perceives it is far less appealing than the mysterious past, full of interdictions that quickened the heartbeats and stirred anyones sympathy. Her translation of A Time Apart has become a mere piece of Ceausist propaganda. People are paying her back for an old arrogance, possibly. She feels humiliated, old jealousies work against her, friends become unfriendly, her job is at stake and she narrowly escapes being fired. She continues to dramatize her position, claiming she was threatened with death on the phone, as a friend of the old rgime, but the effect is the opposite of what she expects. We feel tempted to believe that side of the story. Her tragedy is over, and she has no idea how to survive in its absence, the absence of terror, which made her a privileged protagonist of hope.Tim is trying to understand why Valeria is no longer a friend, and Carolina ejaculates:She had permission to let you meet me at her home. (...) Everything I said to you was recorded. Everything! (...) Somebody knew I was meeting Philip there on his last visits. They asked Valeria to explain. She could not explain. Because she could not, they required her to report in detail any more meetings with foreigners in her house. She reported you were going there to talk with me, and the Securitate made sure it was all recorded.Carolina tells Tim someone actually Liviu Bobolescus son, Virgil, who, Tim was told, had filmed him for the Police whom she trusts has come across her file while the students broke into the secret records of the Securitate. Yet, from another perspective, Carolina herself is perceived as a spy of the Securitate, alongside with her Hungarian lover, Tamasi Ilosz. The new story goes like this:They had instructions and an old professor had instructions to lure Mr. Carston into writing the book. Then they translated the book together and miracle! it is a different book. You cannot speak read Romanian?Tim cannot see for himself. He is supposed to choose for himself, though, and so are we, the readers. We are at last told plainly, by Carolina herself, after Tims surreptitious investigations that infuriate her, that she did write, but only a few paragraphs in Carstons novel, and, yes, she did go to England to visit him, but did not stay longer than a few days. As to her affair with Philip, if Philip and I slept together (...) it was, literally, our fucking business. Not yours. Not that we care, after a whole book. We feel she can safely keep the secret to herself.As for her trip to England we should wonder how she managed to get a passport from the Romanian Securitate, but the novelist does not question that, Brownjohn uses a new device, making Carolina write a letter to Tim. She confesses her love for Philip and her foolish behaviour in London, which any Romanian would find difficult to grasp. She was constantly afraid she was being followed and watched, she felt she had brought with her fear and paranoia. She strongly suspects Philip of being a spy who is dragging her into betraying her country. When she comes back to her senses, the moment her flight takes her back, she produces the following explanation:I could now easily understand why Philip had felt so insecure in Bucharest, having crossed the divide in the other direction.Two victims of sentimental, more than geographical, displacement, Carolina and Philip fail in the attempt at a passionate love affair, and, once the mystery becomes unimportant, though it is never completely solved, they lose interest and die. Both heroes are buried by Tims biography, and also by the play that is staged, and that has no access to reality, being probably none the worse for it. In a conversation (November 25, 2000), Alan Brownjohn told me the novel was written between 1991-1995, and published in Romania before it appeared in England. His irony was meant to point at the confrontation between scandal (Philip Carston, an imaginary figure altogether, has an unknown life that everybody wants to unravel) and art. The question of the love affair, of sex to be more specific, is the fun and suspense of the novel indeed. The ironical perspective confirmed by the author himself works in favour of his being ranked among Desperadoes, and also in favour of the idea that a Desperado will always breathe irony before air. During the same conversation, the novelist confessed he meant Carolina to be likeable, which she is not really. This is another vital point in explaining The Long Shadows, one which darkens Carolinas meaning, to Romanians at least, entirely. She could have been romantic and we could have sympathized with her if she did not look like someone despising, formerly privileged, suspiciously tolerated by the Securitate. She could publish when that alone was a feat, she was the guide of a British novelist and stayed in touch with him, translated his unpublished last novel, was even allowed by the Romanian state to visit him in England. When communism fell, she was perceived by her compatriots as someone attached to the former regime. The facts of the plot are definitely against her, and her haughty attitude, her (possibly) fake secrecy, meant to reinforce her halo and romanticism, are hardly likeable. On the other hand, Philip is not very agreeable or transparent himself. We need Brownjohns explanation, which definitely raises Philips chance at becoming a memorable character. The novelist stated, during the same conversation, that he based Philip Carston on Philip Larkin, who hated travel. Actually, Alan Brownjohn found a very early translation into Swedish of Larkins A Girl in Winter, and suspected the translator might have been acquainted, even romantically involved with Larkin. As it turned out, she was an elderly lady who had never met the author. Although the quotations from Carstons novel are invented, Larkin was very keen on being a novelist, so here again he is similar to Brownjohns hero. On the whole, it is very interesting to notice this Desperado at work, to detect how suggestions from real life sneak their way into a half ironical, half earnest as Brownjohn claims narrative. Besides overt irony, Alan Brownjohn also stated that he meant the novel to be two dystopias in one: on the one hand the dystopia of communism, on the other that of western multinational capitalism. The second is hardly meaningful to someone coming from a former communist regime, but it may be a familiar contention for westerners. When all is said and done, the conclusion is that The Long Shadows is steeped in irony and dystopia, both claiming kinship to the Desperado novel.We have followed a game of ambiguities and half-revelations which Brownjohn will not probe with indiscretion. His heroes are both fictional and poetic. Their fictional face is clear, coherent and tantalizing, relying on well-built suspense. Their poetic halo lies in their hidden potential for sensibility, their bruised soul, at grips with inimical life, whether private, social or political. The author is clearly a Desperado, because he sails the seas of The Long Shadows with constant irony. He sympathizes with everyone, mistrusts everyone, is afraid or disabused in turns, but the distance between him and reality is a smiling desert, which we cross with a smile. Alan Brownjohn tells us, tongue in his cheek: See and smile for yourselves. Fiction has gulped down poetry and smiles down on us enigmatically. There are no more literary genres, but authors and choices. Brownjohn crowds in his novel first and third person narrative, letter, diary, point of view technique (see Henry James, mainly), novel within a novel, author on top of author, poetic symbols, play within a novel, displacement and dystopia. Desperado literature is changing the face and fate of the written page.