Two library books in a row which have caught my interest! Strange how this happens. On the lookout for something similar to the last book about Eleanor of Aquataine I came across this one about Catherine the Great. In my ignorance, I had not heard of the writer, Andrei Makine, before, despite the fact he has written a number of books and is highly thought of. Russian by birth, he writes in French and this copy is translated into English. I have cheated and copied below the library blurb about the book as I didn’t think I could better it. I was, however, disappointed to discover that this is the only book by Makine in my county’s library stock – in fact this is the only copy! – and a search of the neighbouring county showed they only had one other book of his. Looks like Amazon will be busy for me, even Waterstones fail to have copies in stock or speedily on order.
‘Catherine the Great’s life seems to have been made for the cinema. Countless love affairs and wild sexual escapades, betrayal, revenge, murder – there is no shortage of historical drama. But Oleg Erdmann, a young Russian filmmaker, seeks to discover and portray the real Catherine, her essential, emotional truth. When he is dropped from the film he initially scripted – his name summarily excised from the credits – Erdmann is cast adrift in a changing world. A second chance beckons when an old friend enriched by the capitalist new dawn invites him to refashion his opus for a television serial. But Erdmann is made acutely aware that the market exerts its own forms of censorship. While he comes to accept that each age must cast Catherine in its own image, one question continues to nag at him. Was the empress, whose sexual appetites were sated with favours bought with titles and coin, ever truly loved?‘
This is not a ‘heavy’ history book where you need an intricate knowledge of Russia over the last three hundred years. It is easy to read while slipping in comments about the developments in the country over the last thirty or forty years, and drawing parallels about life there before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and putting in enough about the earlier times relevant to Catherine. The layered approach, about Oleg and his life, Catherine, and Russia, works very well and never becomes complicated or confused. The parallels in their fates are never forced upon the reader and the observations of similarities sensitive and informed. The book makes you feel you want to read more of Makine’s works – which suggests he must be doing something right with this one! His three-way tale has made me reassess my attempt at writing a book set in the past – Elizabethan England – and try and apply the same approach, although admittedly in hindsight and through careful editing. I thoroughly recommend this volume of Makine’s.
Jamie Neve 