The reality after the fairytale - Václav Havel book review

Published on Friday 13 June 2008 16:00

TO THE CASTLE AND BACK Václav Havel Portobello, £ 20

IN 1989 the playwright Vclav Havel, then the most prominent Czech dissident and one of the best-known anti-communists in the world, was swept into Prague Castle on the wings of the Velvet Revolution. The arc of his story, Havel remarks in his memoir of his presidency To The Castle And Back, was like that of a fairytale.

But if that moment was romantic, the years that followed – one short term as president of Czechoslovakia, and the two full terms at the helm of the Czech Republic – were mostly prosaic. The man who previously had followed the path of his conscience and had freely spoken his mind now entered, half-willingly, the world of bureaucracy, suits and neckties, compromise, caution, diplomacy and rhetoric. Prague Castle, "one of the oldest seats of a head of power in the world", is a site whose architecture, Havel notes, almost demands intrigue.

To The Castle And Back might be read as an account of idealism in politics as tempered by the push and pull of worldly forces.

Havel's book is actually a tripartite collaboration between himself, his long-time friend and translator Paul Wilson, and the respected Czech journalist Karel Hvizdala. The work is not one continuous narrative, but a selection by Havel of notes, memos to Castle staff, and diary entries between 1993 and 2005, interspersed with long, thoughtful answers to probing questions by Hvizdala.

This makes for a highly appealing structure in which, as in politics, profound and mundane concerns are thrown at each other. Here the President can be heard making a grand point about democracy as "a relationship to the world and to society, a way of thinking"; there he is found arriving at the conclusion that "We need a longer hose for watering", or asking "In the closet where the vacuum cleaner is kept, there also lives a bat. How to get rid of it?" Havel's memos to the staff emphasise the quotidian and practical aspects of politics, and his replies to Hvizdala, the larger shape of his thought and the range of his concerns.

Havel's place in history, grand themes, fidelity to language, powers of self-scrutiny, and distinctive organisation of his material make for a work that should become a classic of political literature.