Travel: Although the Czech Republic has never had a coastline outside the pages of Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale and its "seacoast of Bohemia", to stand in the white space of Prague's Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art is to fancy oneself in an enormous ocean-going liner temporarily run aground on the banks of the Vltava.
Perhaps it has foundered in the mist, of which large quantities billow with melancholy languor from the museum's Josef Sudek prints. Every artist has his element and Sudek's is mist, mists that spill from their frames back out and into the very soul of the city in which he spent his entire creative life. John Banville's first encounter with the work of this great photographer comes under quite different but no less impressive conditions. After dinner with a professor and his wife in communist times he watches the professor unwrap a magical sheaf of Sudeks from tissue paper, a ceremony that fills him with a "vaguely religious, vaguely sacramental" wonder. The next morning these feelings mutate to damp-palmed terror as the border guards on the train inspect the cardboard tube in which the sacred photographs have been concealed for smuggling out of the country.
Prague Pictures is full of such perilous encounters between private and public, and beleaguered lonely souls doing battle with a world of incomprehensible power. In his youth, Jaroslav Hasek, author of The Good Soldier Svejk, founded the Party of Moderate Progress within the Limits of the Law, but the course of Czech history has followed a very different script. Rudolf II, eccentric autocrat, sponsored the heaven-gazing of Brahe and Kepler and the alchemical lucubrations of John Dee, until the Counter-Reformation bloodily intervened and "many ingenious lovely things" were suddenly gone. In the 20th century, there was Kundera's 20-year cycle theory: 20 years of independent Czechoslovakia before the Nazis arrived, 20 years of communism before the Prague Spring and the Soviet crackdown, and 20 years of stagnation before 1989 (which means there are currently six years until - Kundera isn't saying what). Of the names that animate these pages - Capek, Kafka, Neruda (Jan, not Pablo), Seifert, Kundera, Havel - there is scarcely one who has not spent his life looking over his shoulder for the lurking secret policeman.
At a British Council party in the 1990s Banville encounters living proof of this in the person of Professor Goldstücker. An academic and communist of the Novotny years, he fell out of favour in the 1950s and was taken away by the secret police. Asking why he had been arrested he was told, "That's not for us to tell you, but for you to tell us". "Please don't mention Kafka", he tells Banville, already one very obvious step ahead. Reprieved from digging uranium with his bare hands four years later, he is told by the prison director that there may be some delay in releasing him. In the governor's punctilious apology ("It could take two or three hours before we can get you out of here"), he has an epiphany of the full sadism of the Stalinist system. Two or three hours? But let's not mention Kafka.
The quick-fire alternation of Prague's misty beauty and caprices of historical cruelty is never more compulsive than in the descriptions of Banville's beloved 16th and 17th centuries, familiar though they may be to readers of a book described in a footnote as "Ahem. John Banville, Kepler, a novel". This era's cast of minor visionaries, mountebanks and impostors would be scarcely believable in a Banville novel if we didn't already have history's word for it that they exist. Take the preposterous case of Edward Kelley, necromancer and alchemist sidekick to John Dee. Shorn of his ears in England for an unpaid debt, he lost a leg when he fell from a rope in a botched escape from Krivoklat Castle, where Rudolf had him imprisoned for duelling. Later he fell from the same prison window a second time and smashed the other leg in what sounds like a case of suicide on the instalment plan. A vial of poison smuggled to him by his wife soon relieved him of the need to sacrifice any more limbs.
People seem to make a habit of falling out of windows in Prague. One victim missing from Banville's catalogue of the defenestrated is the great novelist Bohumil Hrabal, who fell from a hospital window while trying to feed some pigeons; though at least in Hrabal's case there was no one to beat his fingertips with the hilt of a sword until he let go, as happened to three recusant Catholics in 1618. Mindful of the good soldier Svejk's injunction that it was every patriotic Czech's duty to drink 35 steins of beer a day, Hrabal spent his last days in the glorious pubs of Prague, signing over the film rights to his novels, then signing them over again to the next director to ask. The spirit of Prague gives itself up to visitors with much the same profligate generosity, again and again, even if Kafka's words of warning apply: "this little mother has claws", and does not easily let go.
Banville's is of course a selective view. Not for him what Irish poet and adoptive Praguer Justin Quinn has called the "transparent things" of the city's suburbs, their tower blocks, Ukrainian construction workers and Ikea shops. Instead, Prague Pictures reads like the work of an exile longing for an imagined city that never belonged to him in the first place; and perhaps its note of mournfulness is all the keener for that very reason.
It is a book unlike any other by Banville, a wise and delightful one-off. Writing of Prague's great tradition of puppetry and its fantastic offshoots in Rabbi Loew's Golem and playwright Karel Capek's robot, Banville pauses on Kafka's mysterious star-shaped creature known as Odradek, which emits "a laugh that sounds 'like the rustling of fallen leaves'". In Prague Pictures Banville catches not just the rustling of those fallen leaves but the sound of all the dead voices that, for Estragon in Waiting for Godot, also made a sound "like leaves". "To be dead is not enough for them", Vladimir tells Estragon, but to hear these Prague voices, from Brahe and Kepler to Professor Goldstücker, should be more than enough for us.
- David Wheatley is a poet and critic
Prague Pictures. By John Banville Bloomsbury, 244 pp. £9.99