Book Festival: Mak the Knife

INCISIVE, cutting-edge journalism with sharp judgment – in Dutch writer Geert Mak's hands wonderful stories emerge, says Michael Pye

TAUGHT constitutional law, was city editor and columnist for Holland's Financial Times, knows academic sociology and works for television: Geert Mak is on the cusp of the university and the higher journalism, which is a perch that can split a man in two. It's unusual when such a person doesn't drift off into lecturing a drowsy world or repeating himself on a daily basis, but astounding when he does what Mak does: he goes on being a reporter.

Some of the reporting, as in his Istanbul booklet The Bridge is very good but it doesn't touch the heart. Some of it, though, is as good as anything being done in Europe and all the more remarkable because Mak can start from something very local and specific and small and Dutch and unfamiliar and take you to a huge fact or even a huge truth. And he doesn't write manifestos, either, for all his Pacifist Socialist Party background; he writes wonderful stories.

In the Netherlands he best-sells to the point of absurdity: half a million copies of some titles, read by 16 million people. And, like other best-sellers, you are entitled to wonder if he's a shade too comfortable for truth. He can be irritating, that vaguely religious, woollily commonsensical kind of optimism that the Dutch sometimes affect, useful self-righteousness.

In his essays, for example, he reports that he knows women who sometimes get barracked while cycling in Dutch cities by immigrant kids who call them "whore, whore". He doesn't want to judge, although it isn't anti-Islam to say that cultural differences can be difficult to manage, or sometimes tolerate.

He mocks those who'd say that Europe is being swamped by Islamic newcomers. But it's a lot easier to rely on common sense about statistics when you're white, male, straight and middle-class. If you're a woman on a bicycle, being heckled on the street in her own city, things may seem rather different.

Mak's the extreme case of an obvious thought: the further he is from his own experience, his own city and family and life, the more likely there will be false notes. This is surprising only because he's a writer whose sympathy seems huge. But it is why you're better off discovering him through almost any book except his enormous and very successful In Europe, the first of his books to have a real impact in English.

In it, he celebrates the millennium by driving his little van around a continent to meet its recent history; the text is self-effacingly learned, but still leaves you suspecting he learned more in the library than on the road, he's thoughtful and fascinating but also sometimes smug.

He doesn't report anything or anywhere for long, he catches images like a camera; and for every memorable page about how the Chernobyl catastrophe stopped time in the next town and left Lenin's name up in lights, there's a touch of civics class. For every surprise, there's a bad moment: as when we're told the Dutch were just "unworldly" at Srebrenica (but thousands died.)

Scene by scene, Mak conjures extraordinary things; but he does it scene by scene, sometimes with a banality that insults his subject (the rails to the Warsaw ghetto leave traces in a public park; but the ghetto doesn't.) The book doesn't have some great overarching subject unless it's the cliché that Europeans haven't, for the most part, been killing each other over the past 60 years – except, for example, at Srebrenica. It is extraordinarily good journalism, but it doesn't sing.

And Mak can make subjects sing. He did it with his Amsterdam: a brief life of the City, an utterly loving and sceptical book, the kind a good son writes (and the kind Chinese tourists carry; it's translated into Chinese.) He may well have done it with his own family, in a book which tells a century's history through the papers, postcards and memories left by his sailmaker grand-father and his father, a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church; but we're still waiting for an edition in English.

And he did it most spectacularly in a book which surfaced briefly in English and now seems unavailable again: called Jorwerd in English, not a kind or seductive title, and How God Left Jorwerd in Dutch, which is a bit better, it is the model for the kind of book a historian/journalist ought to want to write.

It's specific, very nicely observed: the soap opera story of a single village and its decline in the last century. It's general: you see clearly the big story of mankind's rush to the cities, the decline of the very idea of community as the countryside once knew it. By the end, the village is part of your experience, and you're still thinking furiously about it, as though it was your own memory.

The Amsterdam book, you might guess, was the easier of the two. It's an urban success story with awful interludes, plenty of riot and intrigue but also plenty of comfort, loveliness, and the weirdness it takes a rich city to afford. You walk around the canals, dimly lit at night for that 17th century atmosphere, and wonder how such a townscape could possibly have survived, especially in the city that virtually invented capitalism (the Dutch sold herring to the Baltic, bought grain back for Northern Europe and in the process invented a futures market.)

It's every kind of gift to a writer. You want to talk about crime in 1664, and you get to start with a Rembrandt sketch of a dead girl hung like a doll in a public place; you find the girl's name and her confessions – to murder – are there in the archive.

You want surprises: read the 17th-century graffiti, mystical and dirty, once written in blood by a great diplomat driven mad by defeat.

You want to write about the 20 years war that started in the 1960s, the famous, diabolically playful war of the generations in Amsterdam, and you're spoiled for detail: how revolution started with an anti-smoking movement, how the wicked pig bourgeois banker Mayor couldn't say he was actually a Resistance hero.

What Mak does with all this is both careful and inspired. He starts with the ongoing, endlessly bothersome issue of Amsterdam's castle: did it have one, and if so does that mean the city wasn't always middle-class? He starts from the moment some castle walls turned up while digging the foundations for an advertising agency's offices, and the fascinated squabbles about the city's identity that followed; it's a good, dry story of civic pride, but it also makes a point: it matters that Amsterdam wasn't feudal. It's a small touch, this starting point, but immaculate.

He's remarkably direct, too, especially about Amsterdam in the Second World War, the outbreaks of heroic resistance, the astounding frauds that kept the Resistance in funds, but also the number of Amsterdammers who simply did their jobs so the city's 80,000 Jews could go East to be murdered.

"You can place ten English pilots in one house," as one preacher put it, "but in ten houses, not one Jew." The accurate balance in the Amsterdam book, not an easy thing to find, is missing in the big, fat In Europe; without his local anchor, Mak starts getting mealy-mouthed about the Dutch war while preaching against the German post-war.

For the local feeds him, sharpens his judgment, too; and the proof is Jorwerd. We're in a small village in the flat cattle country of Friesland, a village that has lost half its population in its century, lost library, post office, harbour, cobbler, bakery, café, then bus, butcher, fire brigade, blacksmith and grocer. The church at its heart now belongs to an association for the preservation of old buildings.

Jorwerd is where Mak grew up, where he goes back from the city, where people trust him enough to tell him some of the secrets. He knows about its long history, the settlements made on mounds in the bogland; the times when the countryside was not just black and white cows and vivid green grass but bright with all kinds of colours; the forces that have shaped what the land could do – from the coming of margarine and railways to carry grain from Russia in the 19th century to the lunatic bureaucratic need to quota and control farming like a factory in the 20th. He's at home there, and also prepared to be puzzled.

He's unsentimental about the country life: he knows everyone invigilated everyone else, that you never went far either on roads or in the hierarchy of the place, that life was very tough and a woman was right to stop her children learning to milk cows because if they did learn that was all they would ever do in life. In one tiny, lovely passage he reports the one time the community went back to being what it once was: when a storm of ice and snow cut it off from the world in 1979, when everyone had to depend on everyone else.

But he senses something dying as humankind floods to the towns; what we're losing along with the poverty, the fatalism, the dung and the booze of the small-scale farming life: an antidote to the selfishness, the loneliness, the rackety demands of city life, a local existence in which it is harder to get free but also harder to get lost. He never makes the choice seem easy.

You could relish Jorwerd as story, and it's not at all bad: a story about families, money, escape, proper eccentrics, feasts and feuds, a developer villain, stoic and heroic grind, and also the unexpected. When new houses come, along with the obvious – the unmarried mum, the gay man – Mak also discovers Salvation Army dissidents.

You could respect the reconstruction of a history buried when the city felt empowered to stop taking country matters seriously, when villages were starved of cash and prospects because they were somehow anachronistic, a challenge to our modern ways. Family farms that go down the generations are a continuity, after all, that has only just been broken; and to be modern is to be discontinuous.

You could learn from the supple but scholarly account of the past, the light use of heavy volumes. But what's truly remarkable about the book is that you do all three at the same time and all the time while reading, and the question you end up asking is: how much discontinuity can humankind bear?

It's not surprising Mak didn't manage quite the same trick for all Europe, even though he made a page-turner of a book from his travels. But it is the reason why he's a writer – above all a reporter – you always need to read.

• Geert Mak is at the Book Festival on 23 August at noon.