Jill Paton Walsh: A Desert in Bohemia

By PAT BASKETT

On the cover of this book the author's name glows in embossed gold, the title is in raised red, and the blurb speaks of the story's optimism making the heart sing. The odds are that the story will be a good holiday read - a popular, as opposed to a literary, novel.

Also on the cover is the information that Paton Walsh's 1994 novel Knowledge of Angels was a Booker shortlist.

Assured, then, of the writer's competence and of a happy ending, we can sit back and immerse ourselves.

The story opens in Czechoslovakia in 1945 and moves through the intertwining lives of nine characters to 1990. The human interest is established in the first pages when Eliska, a survivor of some bloody communist/terrorist attack, seeks refuge in an abandoned mansion and finds a baby girl half-hidden in the kitchen.

She and a young man, a communist who also stumbles into the house, bring up the baby, and one of the plot's threads is the discovery of her identity and that of the owners of the house.

Walsh uses situations and characters that are familiar from the wealth of novels with communist settings over the past 40 years. Episodes illustrating the cruelty and injustice of communist regimes pepper the story, and the characters are polarised between the innocent and good versus the evil lackeys of the state. There are also those (they would be aristocrats!) who were wrongly judged as helping the Nazis when in fact they were rescuing Jews.

To introduce a deeper level, Walsh has an English philosopher visit a clandestine cell of Czech thinkers to give a lecture. The topic is "moral luck" and questions of virtue and responsibility in circumstances judged to be beyond one's control are discussed. The inevitable occurs: the cell is busted, the philosopher and her interpreter are arrested and sent home.

Nothing too terrible happens. But the nice dovetailing of the plot, the restitution of property as if the privileged deserved it after the fall of communism and the final, grandiose act of generosity all contribute to the story's slightly incredible, unsatisfactory nature.

Walsh is also a writer for children and has won awards - among others, the Whitbread Prize. This perhaps accounts for the voice she uses, which is that of a storyteller recounting a fable - fine if that's what you like to read.

Black Swan

$26.96

* Pat Baskett is an Auckland journalist.