Rates of Exchange. By Malcolm Bradbury

Rates of Exchange

Malcolm Bradbury

Penguin Books. First published 1983.

This book was shortlisted for the 1983 Booker Prize. Experience tells that that does not necessarily make for a good read, but this book is one. It relates the academic trip of a British linguistics professor to the (imaginary) east European  country of 'Slaka', under a totalitarian communist regime. The protagonist Prof. Petworth is a colourless man, but meets a variety of men and women in his brief tour of Slaka, the capital city, and a couple of its provincial towns. The descriptions of the geography are like what one reads about an East European or Balkan country with medieval castles and baroque operas. The people of the country are an unsurprising mix of friendly, dull, sexy, uptight, etc., etc. One  encounter is with a low level British diplomat and his near-nymphomaniac wife. The diplomat has a speech defect and this leads to many jokes as he constantly repeats the rude-sounding first syllable of many ordinary words. The politics of the country is the standard cold war fare, reminiscent of Le Carre, Greene, Deighton, et al. Some of scenes remind me of Myanmar, and some, indeed, of socialist India! There are also descriptions of airports and lectures  that sync with some of my own experiences. One the best things about of the book is the language and how Bradbury captures the speech patterns of East Europeans speaking English. Wikipedia calls Bradbury 'a productive academic writer as well as a successful teacher; an expert on the modern novel' and that probably underlies the focus on language and linguistics. There is a lot of humour in the writing as well as in the situations, and not all of them are aimed at socialism. There is no real tale, and the novel does not go anywhere except as a kind of intimate travelogue. There is no final denouement, though for a short space of time it appears as if there would be one. 

A couple of quotations:

'The business of a lecturer is, of course, to lecture... That is why planes have flown to bring him here, hotel rooms have been booked, food set before him  on plates; that is why he has left his house home and country, brought his briefcase, made his way to this point. His head may ache...his wrist may hurt, his split lip blur his talk a little; his heart may be be troubled, his spirit energyless, poor, lacking the will to be, let alone the will to become...but he has a story to tell, and now he is telling it. And telling it, he becomes himself an order, a sentence that grows into a paragraph and then a page, a page and then a plot, a direction incorporating a due beginning, a middle and end. His text before him, he becomes that text;... Petworth for this moment exists.' 

' "So many books", says Petworth..."Yes, every day I read them and become some more a person," says Princip.'