Vesna Goldsworthy dedicates her third novel to “my friends who, like me, grew up east of that line from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic”. Her gloriously vivid tale moves from 1981 to 1990, as the Iron Curtain – along with old Soviet certainties – weakens and falls. Its narrator swaps east for west for love, but struggles to find happiness in either.
Milena Urbanska is the daughter of the second most powerful man in an unnamed Russian satellite. The state has “staid manners and a miserable coast”, but hers is a life of Ray-Bans, Yves Saint Laurent jerkins and the latest fridge freezers. The barrier to the west may be porous to the powerful, but the listless Milena guards her own privacy with adolescent rigour. She cocoons her black-clad body in neoclassical mansions and lakeside retreats, and shakes with fury when her essay is called out for nepotistic praise at a school ceremony. After her boyfriend (the owner of “the only LP of Evita this side of the Iron Curtain”) dies in an accident, she asks Daddy for a translation job, numbing her trauma with a succession of maize cultivation studies. When a rare literary conference is announced, she agrees to shadow Jason, a visiting English poet.
The man who will change her life arrives in an Aran sweater and plimsolls “the colour of a urine sample”. Jason is glib and charismatic and, drunk on novelty and his handsome, narrow face, Milena falls in love. A few months later she is on a flight to England, where drab skies, mug-strewn bedsits and new threats await.
Like her protagonist, Goldsworthy moved to the west in the 1980s, emigrating from Serbia (then part of Yugoslavia) to London to live with her British husband, and working for the BBC before writing memoirs, poetry and now thoughtful, atmospheric novels. She builds her story with wonderfully evocative detail, and as Milena moves from the wary conformity of her homeland to England, bubbles of humour burst through Goldsworthy’s bittersweet brew.
On a visit to Jason’s parents’ underheated country pile, his mother wheels out a grimly credible smörgåsbord of burnt brussels sprouts, sulphurous cabbage and “greasy, glistening” dumplings from her many ovens. Goldsworthy gives Milena sharp replies in the face of British pomposity, and merrily punctures the cliches of London romance: in Kensington Gardens, the lovers watch “ducks waddle and defecate around its rim, and adult men play with miniature, remotely controlled sailing boats”.
There is escape here, of a kind. Sex with Jason is joyful, and London’s neighbourhood shops offer a comforting sense of community and routine. Babies arrive, “tiny and creased from the pressure of the womb, like two loaves of warm brioche”. In the country, farmhouse-dotted fields stretch wetly “like kelp to an invisible sea”, a lyrical contrast to the war-ravaged land and collective farms of home.
But foreboding shadows every finely rendered set piece. It comes from Soviet agents, from the self-centred Jason and from the headstrong, troubled Milena herself. Goldsworthy’s previous novels used a cast of London émigrés to continue the story of Anna Karenina and retell The Great Gatsby. In Iron Curtain, Jason writes a volume of sonnets called The Argonauts, while Milena can be read as a version of Medea, who followed her lover west, and ended her stay with vengeance.
By the dawn of the 90s, the great divide that Milena crossed is no more, and scruffy, old-fashioned London is being remade as a financial capital. Even a child of the elite can be marooned as history’s tides turn. Yet, if Iron Curtain is often pessimistic about its lonely heroine’s world, this is no classical tragedy. The pages fly by, and Goldsworthy’s careful scrutiny brings warmth and sympathy to her tale of belonging and betrayal. Tense, brooding and often hilarious, Iron Curtain finds bright sparks as well as bleakness in the cold war’s dying embers.
• Iron Curtain is published by Chatto & Windus (£14.99). To order a copy for £13.04 go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
