I very rarely express unreserved appreciation for any one particular book.  Andreï Makine’s Confessions of a Lapsed Standard Bearer, is an exception. A slim novel that’s almost easy to miss on the shelf, Makine’s book has two principle virtues.  It is a touching, poignant tale written with sensitivity which fully engages the reader.  It also offers a fascinating perspective on Soviet life rarely found in the Western mainstream at least. Written as the reminiscence of a Soviet defector to a childhood friend, the novel traces the youth of two children growing up in the USSR.  Moving from their days in the Young Pioneers, to their family lives, to their gradual disillusionment.

Throughout the novel, Makine maintains a sensitive tone not unlike that of a man gazing at the past through rose-tinted glasses.  It’s not that bad things don’t happen – it’s that they do, and that the narrator wishes for a return to the simplicities of childhood.  The result is a touching tale whose narrative sticks in the mind pleasantly.

What makes the novel most interesting, though, is the not entirely incidental depiction of everyday Soviet life it gives.  Makine is a Russian, born in the 1950s, who defected to France in the 1980s.  The insight he can thus provide into growing up in the USSR is as valuable as it is interesting. Previously, my closest knowledge of everyday life in Soviet Russia came from Solzhenitsyn – who hardly provides a typical example.  Millions were interned in the gulags of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.  But millions of others simply lived the ordinary lives of ordinary civilians.  It is this perspective that Makine provides for us in Confessions of a Lapsed Standard Bearer.

What’s immediately apparent is that, by Western standards, conditions were grim.  The characters live in dull, communal housing.  Food is rationed.  The days are very clearly monotonous – they get up, they go and do hard, physical labour, they come home.  Even seemingly trivial changes mean huge news for the local community.  When a local landmark, “The Pit,” is filled in, it’s one of the biggest things to have happened in years.  In short, they virtually live in poverty.

What’s even more striking though is that no-one seems to mind.  It might be that they’re well provided for in some senses.  They all get an education, albeit a heavily controlled one.  They all get fed, albeit basically.  They’re all guaranteed a job and a roof over their heads. But even then, it’s all a very basic standard of life.  Perhaps it’s because they’ve never known anything better?  The characters’ will certainly never have known a better life.  Perhaps they have other things on their minds – ideals, even?  The narrator was very enamoured of the Red Flag, always marching onto the horizon, as a boy.  In the Soviet newspapers, only positive news for communism appears – so events like the Cuban Revolution lead to the families thinking the global victory is imminent.  Perhaps it’s nothing to do with the conditions at all?  The narrator’s positive reminiscences may simply be for the simple days of youth.

Of course, the book isn’t perfect.  If nothing else, it probably loses something in translation – Makine is a Russian who writes in French and is translated into English.  Nor is the novel a, “classic,” of literature – but it doesn’t try to be.  What it does try – and succeed – in being is a sweet, poignant memoir of a forever lost childhood, with the added bonus of seeing Soviet life from the ground up for once.