Oddly revolutionary reading: "The Last Hundred Days" by Patrick McGuinness

This one was an impulse buy in Brussels Waterstones, where I had gone for something completely different. My eye was somehow caught by the grainy black and white cover photograph of a motorcade of large boxy black cars progressing through a wide urban boulevard. It seemed to me to be something to do with 1960s America, but turned out on closer inspection to be a scene from 1980s Romania, and to be a novel about the end of the communist bloc's most capriciously despotic regime (save perhaps Albania), that of Nicolae Ceausescu and, to an extent I came to appreciate, his pseudo-scientist and fellow head-case wife, Elena.

The angle of the story is quite unusual, centring on a young British lecturer recruited to teach English in Bucharest university in 1989, something achieved without him even bothering to turn up to his scheduled interview for the post. (When I mentioned this to a Romanian colleague who remembers those days, she expressed no surprise whatsoever at this curious methodology.)

Not, of course, that it took much to pique my curiosity. The events surrounding the events of twenty years ago in Europe continue to fascinate me and have course feature quite regularly in these book reviews one way or another. However, Romania, where the transition was uniquely traumatic and to some extent rather ambivalent, had sort of slipped through the net, although I had by chance recently seen one of the bleakest films ever, Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, which tells the unremittingly grim tale of getting an abortion in late 80s Romania, when to do so was a crime, thanks to Ceausescu's deranged population policy.

Suffice to say, I bought the book, which unbeknownst to me, had actually been presented by its author in the European Parliament just the day before. Shame, I'd have been curious to see him.

The novel, the cover of which indicates it was Booker long-listed, actually reads more like a memoir or autobiography, as it surely is in part, McGuinness indeed having been there like his protagonist. The unnamed young Brit protagonist, who, for reasons come to seem rather extraneous and tangential, is very keen to leave behind his life in the UK, enters the bizarre world of the expat community in Bucharest, where he is taken under the wing of a louche fellow refugee from the free world. This character, Leo, is maybe the most memorable feature of the novel, whose myriad activities connect him to the many currents of a society and a state falling apart. He is, at the same time, academic, black marketeer, cynic and idealist, friend of dissidents and secret policeman, a fixer and a failure, a fount of boundless energy and a dissolute drunkard. And a completely credible character in the mad world of the Ceausescus, where diplomats mix with gangsters, the children of the nomenklatura swig vintage wines from the bottle and crash their Ferraris with abandon, while ordinary people have nothing and everyone is locked in the fearful and tortured logic of all-pervasive paranoia.

The perspective of this book makes it an atypical view of the Romanian revolution. The protagonists, though they brush repeatedly and even violently with the state apparatus, also live in what seems a slightly parallel dimension, which gives them both a privileged and slightly removed view of what happens. They are best placed to observe the disintegration of the world of the powerful - though also the manipulative hand many of them had in events - and the disarray of parasitical worlds of crooks and diplomats, than the upheaval in the streets of Romanian cities, which comes as an outburst of violence in the final pages of the book viewed on TV rather than experienced directly. The tale is thus more the outsider's inside view of a fin de regime than a ground-level view of the revolution. Ordinary Romanians remain slightly mysterious figures. The closest we get to them is in the figures of Ioanna, Leo's improbable girlfriend (as a ticket out of Romania) and the hero's second lover in the book, an idealistic nurse somehow doing some good in the hospital from hell. Otherwise, we see the privileged and protected: university academics, venal and insecure; apparatchiks, the puppet masters of the regime and possibly also the revolution; the gilded youth of the nomenklatura's progeny, exempt from the grey privations of their fellow countrymen; sleazy arms-peddling diplomats, with an eye only for which side their bread is buttered on; secret policemen, devious, brutal and thuggish; young dissidents, naive and easily betrayed; crooks, gangsters, pimps, feeding off the pain and despair of ordinary people; and the psychotic playboy elite hanging out with their cunning sleazeball Serbian buddies.

As you can perhaps tell, and as I can now see writing about it, this book left me with strong impressions. This is not a tale of ordinary Romanians, says little about what it was like, down there on the street, when events ran out of control and the Securitate started shooting. That fact perhaps left me a little disappointed, but I can see now that it was never the intention to tell that story. This is the story of an outsider in Romania at that most unusual of times, caught up not in the events so much at street level but in some intermediate world lodged curiously between the street and the spheres of the powerful, involved with and compromised by both but belonging to neither.

Frankly, I could not really find it in myself to engage with the main character, though I felt the author wanted me to, feeling if anything somewhat impatient with his personal back-story and "deeper" motivations. Maybe that has to go down as a weak point of this book. Some of the other characters stretch credibility somewhat. But this is really the story of a time and a place, and a particular - and particularly revealing milieu within it. That it does very well indeed, and if a new angle on the events of 1989 interests you, then this is a worthwhile read.

Sitting in the middle of a revolution