The Year Of Living Frantically
The Sunday Age
Sunday April 25, 1999
NICOLAS ROTHWELL is in Quilpie, south-west Queensland. He is in town to cover a meeting of the regional women's alliance. It is a far cry from 10 years ago, when the somewhat larger scale story he was pursuing was the collapse of communism, which necessitated a tour of Soviet satellite states as the domino effect gathered speed.
Rothwell worked out of London, ``corresponding", as he puts it, for The Australian. But he was constantly aware that the scale of the events and their resonance were too great to be captured in journalism.
He reckons most journalists have some sort of itch to write fiction but the pace of 1989 was so frenetic that any such urge was, by necessity, sublimated.
``I just had a very strong feeling when I was thinking about this year, in the year or two after it passed, that it almost called forth from those people who had been observers a kind of further response," he says.
Rothwell's ``further response" came earlier this month with publication of his first novel, Heaven and Earth. Its protagonist is Caspar Kilian, a correspondent covering Europe for an American newspaper. It begins in Bucharest in December 1988 as Caspar is about to interview Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian president, and ends a year later in the same city as Ceausescu meets his violent end.
Along the way, we experience with Caspar the end of the regimes in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. There is the newspaper angle with the frantic chase for stories, new angles, fresh color, the jostling to stay as top dog on a big story, the tortured relations with colleagues, editors and proprietors. There is the political angle as Caspar moves between the mysterious envoys of the two great powers, gaining insights and tidbits that fall from their tables as they play out their endgame on the chess board of Europe. And there is the domestic angle as Caspar comes to terms with the death of his father and tries to sort out his relationship with an American diplomat.
It is an ambitious novel that rewards perseverance, increasingly absorbing as Rothwell shifts his cast of real and fictional characters across the political and emotional terrain of a rapidly changing Europe.
Ask him about the book and you will get his ``spiel" on it, expressed in his self-deprecating, hesitant way. But the vision of what he wanted to achieve is clear.
``I see it as addressing questions of dictatorship. There are three tiers of dictatorship, one of which is the internal and familial of a generational change, the central character wishing to come to terms with the domineering influence of parents. The second and most obvious is the political dictatorship, which an entire continent thinks it is struggling with. And the third, which ripples into shape towards the end, is the dictatorship of the control of information," he says.
``The thing that interests me is this sense of tremendous pressure that is brought to bear on people by these dictator figures, whether they be doing it out of love or hate or an urge to control."
Caspar's opening encounter with Ceausescu is one that Rothwell was able to build from his own experience. He interviewed the Romanian dictator and ``certainly got a little whiff of scorn, vulnerability and complexity which were whistling round the edges of his personality".
Rothwell is at pains to ensure that he takes no liberties with the real figures such as Mikhail Gorbachev and Alexander Dubcek who feature in the novel. Thoughts and feelings that are internalised are done so only in cases where the character is dead. So he can make the most, say, of the opening encounter with Ceausescu but with someone such as Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright who became the symbol of the opposition to the Czechoslovak regime, he says he has been careful not to claim to know what he was thinking.
Of the many contrived characters in the novel, perhaps the most interesting is the media tycoon Lambourne, the chairman of the group that owns the paper for which Caspar works and a mysterious figure who pops up at surprising moments determined to influence events in his own way and shift his people around as pieces in the global information game.
Most readers will think of only one man when they encounter Lambourne: Rupert Murdoch. But Rothwell denies that Murdoch, who owns The Australian, was the primary model for the character.
``Clearly he jumps off from certain biographical parallels with Rupert Murdoch but equally oddly, at the time that I was writing the book I was very much on the periphery of another media magnate's world and I think if Lambourne is like anybody living at all in his intellectualisation of things it's (Canadian proprietor of Britain's Daily Telegraph) Conrad Black," he says.
He says that he has no idea how Murdoch might feel ``if he finds time to read such a work" as Heaven and Earth, but concedes that the Australian-American was in his thoughts as he was conceiving the character. Then, quickly, he reminds you that it is, after all, a story and not about a real person.
He is trying to make a parallel between the control of information and the control of a people. The likes of his media magnate character are ``people of unexampled power and influence who are arbitrary, isolated and - in their impact on people - at times oppressive and at times whimsical; something that is strongly reminiscent of the positions of those chilly dictators in central and eastern Europe".
Caspar Kilian becomes a go-between-like figure through whom ``all these vectors of power are doing a dance with each other and communicating their messages".
Rothwell shows us the fate of the political dictators but allows Caspar to spell out the destiny of them all in his final scene with Lambourne.
```And you know, don't you, Mr Chairman, what happens to dictators?'
`They die,' said Lambourne.
`Not only! In the great dark of time, and the grave, they are forgotten - even their names."'
Rothwell comes from a long line of journalists. His father was not only a foreign correspondent for The Australian but also that paper's editor for a while. His paternal grandfather and great-grandfather were also both newspaper editors. Rothwell's mother is Czech. Because of his father's overseas postings, he went to school in Switzerland and London and took a classics degree at Magdalen College, Oxford, before falling into journalism. ``I grew up in a world where it was simply what grown-ups did."
Writing Heaven and Earth allowed him to focus on the European side of his experience but this self-confessed internationalist and nomad is now based in Australia in a self-conscious attempt to re-connect with his father's homeland.
``Having been here for three years it's been very much a process of re-enrapturement and I spend my time moving round Australia partly selfishly because I want to drink it in .. it is the most fascinating place for someone with writing aspirations."
He stopped being a foreign correspondent partly because he realised that he would never again cover such a story. Current events in the Balkans sadden him and do not tempt him. He remains puzzled by ``this strange desire for ethnic cleansing" and wonders whether it is not some sort of reaction against ``the internationalism of the brotherhood of people that was rammed down everyone's throats by satellite regimes of communism".
He has no desire to go back to report overseas.
``I think this is a tremendously politically fluid and exciting country for a journalist and a writer. I'm overjoyed to have stumbled into this phase of my life."
Heaven and Earth is published by Duffy & Snellgrove.
© 1999 The Sunday Age
