Professor Martens' Departure Book

How do you write about things that you love? More to the point how can you write about the books that you love and succeed in sharing with other readers what about them captivates and enriches you?

A book and its reader are a relationship and the resulting love can be as inexplicable to the onlooker as any that we see between apparently mismatched people. I once tried to persuade my mother to read The Blue Flower but saw the look in her eyes when I had got as far as explaining that the poet Novalis had fallen in love with a young girl and realised that as far as she could tell I seemed to really like a book about paedophilia. In other words, you get one chance and its easier to get it wrong than to get it right.

Well this is another book that I care deeply for. I can't say that it is perfect or ideal but something between setting, themes and the way that it is told caught me from my first reading and pleases me whenever I pick it up again.

This is a novel set a few years before the First World War. It is told from the point of view of a single narrator - an older man travelling from his summerhouse towards St.Petersburg. He is an Estonian, a subject of the Russian empire, a Professor of international law, a public figure involved in the Hague Conventions and the negotiations with Japan over the peace treaty after the 1904-5 war he is also a marginal, secretive figure, existing in a police state, which has to be dealt with circumspectly. The significance of more than a word spoken to the wrong person can lead to imprisonment. Privacy and reserve are not simply character habits but survival strategies. Yet Imperial honours, regard and acknowledgement, are still alluring and yearned for.

To say that he is Estonian in the Russian empire is to skim across thin ice. Privacy, reserve and self-harming silence as well as yearning for recognition by Government and court are natural reactions to the fact of being Estonian in the Russian empire. Kross, writing for an Estonian audience reading in the Soviet Union, didn't need to lay this out block by block in a way that would clog up the text. Instead the sense of being a submerged people with a distinct culture at risk of Russification but in a state in which collaboration is the way to worldly success emerges, shyly suggested, through the narrative.

However just to make life a little more complicated as the Professor Martens of the title travels by train from his native Estonia to St Petersburg, recalling his life spent in service to the Tsars and international law, his recollections are interspersed with recollections of a previous life in the 18th century when he was an expert in international law in the service of German potentates and the short lived Napoleonic Kingdom of Westphalia. Aspects of each life have parallels to each other and enlarge on his consideration of the question of identity and political allegiance, which in turn leads on to contemporary political developments, Estonian nationalism and socialism. Implicitly the Professors experience of many lives and the internationalism of both I suppose affirms the idea that Estonia is one of the family of western European nations rather than simply a word shy province of Russia.

In the penultimate stage of his journey, noting that this is a book about departure and all that this word might imply, he is accompanied by a younger woman. In conversation with her we see that his future will be different. The secrets and lies that dogged Martens' career and life are not experiences that have to be repeated. Not just in this life but perhaps also in future. The overly careful life of one man is made to stand as a promise for the future of a country, but as much through the silence of what is not written as though the words which are deployed on the page.