Judgment on Deltchev

"It’s about a show trial and it’s also a moment in the life of Eric Ambler, who I think is one of the most intelligent and illuminating thriller writers of the 20th century, when he goes through that moment that a lot of left-wing people go through when he realises that what he used to believe in isn’t sound any more, and he does it with his usual great intelligence and his fine plotting and understanding of how people actually behave and work. There are also some wonderful descriptions of what it was like to be a journalist trying to operate in a Communist capital and some marvellous moments of seediness which Graham Greene couldn’t have outdone. I can’t recommend it highly enough to anybody who’s interested in both in thrillers and in politics. Well, Deltchev is a politician who has fallen from grace in the Communist regime of an unnamed Eastern European country, and what the hero of the book (as in all Ambler’s books the hero is a sort of antihero) begins to discover as preparations go ahead for the trial, is just how complicated the past of this man really is. The seediness – there is a man whose name escapes me who is the hero’s fixer and helper and is, amongst other things, appallingly smelly. The description of having to deal with this pathetic, repellent and smelly personality and rely on him, and also at one point to be morally outpointed by him, is actually rather telling and sticks in the mind. There is the moment when you’re dealing with people in these places that you realise with your Western arrogance, having come from your wholly free country where you can say and write and do what you like, what it actually might be like to try and make a living in a country of this kind, and the point is rather harshly made here in a little speech which I can’t quote because I don’t have the book to hand. If you’ve been in this situation you recognise it. Well, there’s nothing to say you can’t be left-wing, but it might suggest to those who are left-wing that they could be a bit more hesitant about their certainties. Show trials arise from certainties and the fury of people who are certain of their own goodness against those who don’t necessarily share that belief. That doesn’t just apply to Communists, Marxists, Trotskyists, but in the past century it has tended to be idealists of one kind or another who have ended up holding show trials."