With diplomatic relations between Russia and the west at one of its lowest ebbs since the cold war, there could hardly be a better moment for the publication of Vesna Goldsworthy’s teasingly titled new novel, Iron Curtain: A Love Story. A bittersweet tale of loyalty, love and the siren call of freedom, it offers a timely reminder of how much is at stake for countries whose memories of life under Soviet rule — or in its shadow — are still raw.

Set in an unnamed communist bloc state in the 1980s, the novel is narrated by twentysomething Milena, the daughter of a high-ranking member of the Politburo, who is cosseted and controlled in equal measure. She lives with her parents in a luxurious villa attended by a driver, cleaner, cook and assorted others. “‘Servants’ was a term we studiously avoided,” she notes, “underpinned by our care for the dignity of labour.” Unlike most of her compatriots, Milena has access to hard currency, Coca-Cola and western designer brand clothing. But her home is bugged, her movements monitored and her choice of friends severely circumscribed.

After her boyfriend Misha blows his brains out during a game of Russian roulette, Milena’s life goes into freefall. Her increasing disaffection with the contradictions of her privileged imprisonment is accelerated by the arrival of a handsome young poet, Jason Connor, flown in from London as part of a carefully choreographed cultural event.

‘Iron Curtain’ is more dark comedy than Greek tragedy, but a serious seam runs through the novel

Jason is everything Milena is not: idealistic, passionate, feckless and free. His scruffy clothing, wholly inadequate for the freezing temperatures, confirms Milena’s father’s belief in his country’s superiority over Britain: “Here was the proof . . . the imperialists dispatched their poets abroad in rags.” Appointed translator to this golden-haired foreigner, Milena finds her icy cynicism starting to thaw, and when Jason flies home a few days later, she is left bereft — and pregnant.


This is Goldsworthy’s third novel (she is also an award-winning poet, memoirist and non-fiction author) and in many ways her most daring for the questions it poses about ideological prejudice and national stereotypes. Goldsworthy grew up in Belgrade, then part of Yugoslavia, moving to London in 1986 at the age of 24, and the novel draws on her first-hand experience of life under pre-Glasnost communism.

“All Communist countries were supposed to be alike,” Milena acerbically observes. “Socialism was scientific after all, a repeatable experiment.” Goldsworthy plays with this idea by making the country she depicts in Iron Curtain a composite of former satellite states of the Soviet Union, a parody of the west’s long history of cultural appropriation of the Balkans, which was itself the subject of her acclaimed non-fiction book Inventing Ruritania.

“Have I gone back in time?” Jason asks on his first day behind the Iron Curtain, and the flattened precision of Goldsworthy’s prose seems to provide an answer. There is a glacial quality to the first half of the novel, which powerfully enacts Milena’s sense of entrapment but also somewhat impedes the story’s momentum. The pace picks up when Milena decides to follow her heart and defects to England. Cut loose from the suffocating protection of family and state, her narration acquires a new vitality, but the allure of capitalist freedom, “vibrant and welcoming on the surface, but feral underneath”, rapidly loses its shine.

London in the early 1980s is gleefully conjured in all its unadorned awfulness: chilly bedrooms, bone-numbing damp, woodchip wallpaper, disgusting food. Ensconced with her penniless wannabe-Shelley in a dismal basement flat in Shepherd’s Bush, Milena soon realises that her beloved’s embrace of socialism is skin deep. “In Marxist-Leninist parlance, he was a genuine opportunist.” His parents, meanwhile, are fallen aristocrats, more obviously devoted to their dogs than their children, happier spending money on champagne than heating their crumbling country pile.


Like the Russian oligarchs in Goldsworthy’s 2015 novel Gorsky, a playful reworking of The Great Gatsby relocated to 1990s London, Milena is on a steep learning curve about what money can and can’t buy. Except in her case, the only money she has access to are the occasional wads of cash delivered by her father’s agent to drive home the point that freedom is a costly business.

In case we miss the earlier allusions to Euripides’ Medea, Goldsworthy has Jason working on a poetry collection called The Argonauts. Like her ancient Black Sea princess counterpart, Milena is every bit the defiantly disloyal daughter, abandoning family and country for love of her thieving heart-throb, and going on to bear him two sons — but when Jason proves as fickle as his namesake, Milena is equally ruthless in her revenge.

Goldsworthy writes with a light touch and understated humour, and Iron Curtain is more dark comedy than Greek tragedy, but a serious seam runs through the novel. Living in grinding poverty in Thatcher’s Britain is no joke. “The poorest workers in my homeland have warm homes to go to, even at minus twenty,” Milena observes, “and here I was freezing at well above zero.” Jason flirts with impecunity, secure in the knowledge of the safety net provided by membership of the English social elite. The stakes are altogether higher for Milena, who must choose between one imperfect freedom and another.

The novel’s last words are given to Milena’s father Comrade Urbansky, in a symbolic assertion of the supremacy of state control. But in the blank space beyond the final full stop, the reader is left with the knowledge that only two years later the curtain will fall and Urbansky’s world will be swept away. The question now is: for how long?

Iron Curtain by Vesna Goldsworthy, Chatto & Windus £14.99, 336 pages

Rebecca Abrams is the author of ‘Touching Distance’ (Picador)

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