- The Golden Maze: A Biography of Prague, by Richard Fidler. HarperCollins. $39.99.
Finishing Richard Fidler's rollicking story of Prague put me in mind of a few long nights once spent in the Czech capital's beer halls. My memories are of stout waiters ferrying steins of Pilsner and meeting evocative characters with no end of stories to tell. The mornings after, I'd wake up not recalling exactly every detail of what went on but well satisfied I had the most unforgettable time.
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Fidler first visited Prague in 1990, a few months after its residents shook off Communist rule amidst the wave of people-powered revolutions that swept Eastern Europe the year prior. He returned close to 30 years later to begin work on a book that is three-parts narrative history and one-part reportage. The Golden Maze is written in the easy, accessible style familiar to readers of his two previous efforts, Ghost Empire and Saga Land, or anyone who has listened to him on the ABC.
Fidler is reminiscent of the pub raconteur who wears their intelligence lightly. He deploys neat turns of phrase and diverting asides in clear and comprehensible order to step through episodes from Prague's pre-history to the present. We learn everything from the history and afterlife of 'Good King' Wenceslas, the Czech origins of the word "dollar", to the work of the scientist Ernst Mach, for whom the speed of sound is named. A cassowary from New Guinea makes an appearance, as does everyone from Albert Einstein to Shirley Bassey.
The final half of The Golden Maze charts the turbulence of Prague's last 100 years. The city becomes the capital of an independent Czechoslovakia in 1918, but the country was snookered from the start. Flawed and incomplete as many leaders were, they were hostage to great power disputes beyond their influence.
The book spans an impressive narrative range. There is a deeply humorous sequence involving an alchemist and an ear-less charlatan who arrive in Prague in the 1500s. There is sorrow too. Threaded through Prague's history have always been murderous eruptions of intolerance. Fidler travels to a Jewish ghetto where Nazi propogandists made documentaries portraying its seemingly idyllic conditions. It was all a sham. "As soon as filming was complete, the transports to Auschwitz resumed," he writes.
Close to 40 pages of endnotes and bibliography at the book's end attest to the serious scholarship that went into this. All of which begs the question: by what process of modern-day alchemy does this busy man summon the time to produce such an impressively readable book?
- Gordon Peake's Beloved Land, about Timor-Leste, won the ACT Book of the Year award. He is writing his next book about Papua New Guinea.
