A Desert in Bohemia
By Jill Paton Walsh
St. Martin’s Press
2000 (first edition)
Condition: Very good; owner’s name inscribed; additional inscription reads: “Door County, Feb. 2001.”
Why I keep it: intellectual, emotional [*]
British author Jill Paton Walsh may be best known for her work as a children’s author and for her mysteries featuring sleuth Imogen Quy. She also completed Dorothy L. Sayers’ final unfinished novel “Thrones, Dominations.” Less well known in the United States are her adult novels, including “Knowledge of Angels” (shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize) and “A Desert in Bohemia.”
I picked up “A Desert in Bohemia” while on vacation in Door County, Wis. in February 2001 when Jesse and I were shopping at the lovely independent Passtimes Books in Sister Bay. I’ll admit that I was first drawn to the novel because of its evocative cover (a scratched sepia-toned photo of an angel statue with the title in cursive script), but a cover alone isn’t enough to make me buy a book.
The opening paragraph electrified me:
The forest edge was thick with the mist of early morning when the woman staggered out of the last line of trees, and stood there, staring. A very young woman; one might say a girl. She was blood-boltered from head to foot, her hair thickly matted in a helmet of coagulated blood, her clothes sodden and clinging with it. A bird flew up from above her with clattering wing beats, and she shrank back between the trees, with her teeth chattering in her head. But when the silence had re-formed she stepped forward again. Into an overgrown, half-vanished garden white with frost, with the mist swirling over it, the house in the garden only faintly visible to her.
Who was this girl? Why was she “blood-boltered from head to foot”? Where was she now? Was someone following her?
I remember sitting on the floor in the bookstore and reading the next page. Gunshots sound in the distance. The girl tries to enter the house attached to the “half-vanished garden.” I looked around, feeling guilty. Maybe I should just buy the damn novel, I thought. And then: But, first, another page. The girl manages to get inside the house and to safety where she finds an infant by the fire. Despite narrowly escaping death herself, her instincts kick in, and she begins to care for the child.
I imagine what I must have looked like at that moment: novel clutched in two hands, legs straight out in front of me, eyes large and skimming as fast as possible, all of my focus on the story in front of me. Jesse stepped up to me then and said: “I’ll just buy it if you like it that much.” And so he did.
We spent a long, romantic weekend in Door County, skiing and relaxing. We were a relatively new couple, and I think I fell in love a little bit harder and faster when he bought me the book. Here was a man who cared deeply about my intellectual life. During every available moment, I read “A Desert in Bohemia,” and sometimes I read good bits aloud, during which Jesse listened patiently and commented lucidly on the story.
The story follows nine people from 1945 to 1990 in an attempt to make sense of totalitarianism’s far-reaching effects. Reviewer Lily Thayer summed up the story’s narrative arc best when she wrote:
…her ambitious new novel “A Desert in Bohemia” elegantly and effectively explores the experiences of three generations of Czechs under two successive authoritarian regimes. It also fits neatly into a literary tradition that documents totalitarianism’s effect on the human soul.
What I loved best about the novel was that as a reader I learned so much about the world in which these characters live: the smells, the sounds, the sights. Yet, what I learned about their emotional lives, I had to glean from their actions.
The novel felt familiar to me, not in the sense that I had read a similar story (I hadn’t), but rather in the sense that it plugged into a larger literary tradition. In some ways, Paton Walsh’s exquisite novel pays homage to the best of Sartre and Kafka’s work. The reader is as bewildered as the novel’s characters, and that bewilderment serves to highlight important philosophical considerations.
Lest I make this book sound bone-dry, go back and re-read that opening paragraph. Paton Walsh keeps up that pace throughout the story, all while writing beautiful sentences. I treasure this book both for its intellectual scope and for its connection to a perfect moment in my personal life.
Next: “Tender at the Bone” by Ruth Reichl
Further reading:
Jill Paton Walsh & Dorothy L. Sayers
“Wimsey, Sayers and Me” from Shots: The Crime & Mystery Magazine