Rates of Exchange by Malcolm Bradbury

First published: 1983

Type of work: Parody

Time of work: 1981

Locale: Eastern Europe

Principal Characters:

• Angus Petworth, a professor of linguistics and an occasional British Council lecturer
• Marisja Lubijova, his official guide during his stay in the anonymous imaginary Eastern European country of which Slaka is the capital
• Katya Princip, the beautiful magic realist writer with whom Petworth has a brief affair
• Lottie, the “dark” wife whom Petworth has left behind in England
• Professor Plitplov, the comic figure who conspicuously shadows Petworth and who claims to be responsible for Petworth’s visit
• Steadiman, the stuttering cultural affairs officer at the British embassy in Slaka

The Novel

Angus Petworth arrives in the city of Slaka, the capital of the novel’s anonymous and imaginary Eastern European country, to deliver a series of lectures on linguistics for the British Council. In going from London to Slaka, however, Petworth has traveled more than a merely geographical distance. He has also gone from a capitalist to a Socialist society, from the known to the unfamiliar, from domestic limitations to amorous possibilities, and from realism to fabulation. Although ostensibly in the country “to perform utterance,” Petworth is nevertheless also in search of something much less prosaic, yet as an adventurer of sorts and a would-be romantic, he is singularly ill-equipped to fulfill this or any other larger mission, being as he is easily confused and entirely ignorant of Slakan language and customs. Once in Slaka, he quickly comes under the influence of no fewer than four guides.

There is his official guide, Marisja Lubijova, whose heavy-sounding name fits her pragmatic acceptance of what life in a Socialist country demands of her. Then there is Professor Plitplov, a caricature of obsequiousness and conspicuous self-effacement who claims to be the one responsible for arranging Petworth’s visit (why he may have arranged it is even less certain) and who hints at some perhaps sexual connection with Petworth’s wife, Lottie (a hint that may amount to nothing more than Plitplov’s inability to express himself adequately in English). There is also Steadiman, whose warnings concerning the entrapment of Westerners by the secret police and their female operatives hangs heavily over all that Petworth does (or does not do) and over the reader as he moves through Bradbury’s novel. Finally, there is the beautiful magic realist novelist, Katya Princip, with whom Petworth has a brief affair and who offers Petworth not only love (however momentary) but also an alternative both to socialism and to his own Western fecklessness and passivity, a way that is dissident, imaginative, postmodern, yet decidedly pragmatic.

Against the caution that Marisja counsels, Katya advises taking risks and making one’s own imaginative reality. Otherwise, she claims, reality becomes only the story that others tell and one must endure. Gradually, Petworth becomes, if not a character in the world-historical sense, then at least the leading figure—“Stupid”—in the postmodern fairy tale that Katya tells and in this way attains a certain level of significance. Exactly what significance is unclear, for as her “Stupid,” Petworth may be folk hero or fool, protagonist of his story at last or prisoner of the reality that Katya has fashioned for him in order to have him agree to smuggle her latest manuscript out of the country. Against the backdrop of slapstick political turmoil, Petworth, oblivious as ever, passively and timidly does agree, only to fail once again, his briefcase off-loaded at a German airport and destroyed as a suspected terrorist bomb. Returning to England and to the enigmatically dark Lottie, Petworth appears decidedly provincial and antiheroic, more a character of Tom Sharpe than of John le Carre.

The Characters

As one might suspect about a novel having so antic a plot, Bradbury’s characters appear as comic caricatures, at least at first, but slowly they begin to take on, if not the substantive weight of the figures in realistic fiction, then a nevertheless surprising depth, a certain elusiveness that gives the novel much of its emotional power. Petworth, for example, possesses so minimal a self that Bradbury does not bother to divulge his surname for some five thousand words and his Christian name not for another fifty thousand. Lecturing on “the uvular R” and the difference between “I don’t have” and “I haven’t got,” Petworth has so tenuous a hold both on reality and on himself as to be an easy target for the Slakans, who linguistically transform Petworth into Petwurt, Petwit, Pervert, and the like. Yet even Petworth has his humanities, as Herman Melville once said of a far more dynamic character, Captain Ahab. Like the hero of Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King (1959), Petworth has his inarticulate desires, even if his “I want I want” is far less clamorous and insistent than Henderson’s cri de ciur. He is so unsure of how to proceed, or whether he should proceed at all, that he falls prey not only to his own indecisiveness and internal contradictions but also to his several guides, Bradbury’s versions of Bellow’s “reality instructors.”

What complicates Petworth’s situation, and the reader’s as well, is his difficulty in deciding which of his guides to trust and how far this trust should go, for with the possible exception of the buffoonish Steadiman, all the major characters are rendered in deliberately ambiguous terms, their own desires and allegiances as divided as Petworth’s. For all of her Party-minion gruffness and social realist style, Marisja, for example, eventually speaks in a quite different voice, one having more to do with desire than necessity. For all of her magic realism and dissident politics, Katya Princip can sound, or at least seem, dismayingly down to earth when it comes to the facts of her own life in Slaka and the compromises which that life requires of her.

Critical Context

The most obvious “sources” for Rates of Exchange are two American novels about Western visitors to Eastern Europe: John Updike’s Bech: A Book (1970) and Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December (1982). From these novels Bradbury borrowed character-types, plot lines, and narrative situations, but he added his own postmodern interest in language. Moreover, Bradbury shared with Bellow a particular distaste for the ways in which the modern world has come to overwhelm the lives of contemporary men and women. In a world of sadomonetarism, as Bradbury called it, the individual has become not merely subordinate to economic and political reality—openly in Eastern Europe, more subtly in the West—but expendable as well, as expendable, in fact, as the liberal humanism that Bradbury espoused and the Anglo-liberal novels he preferred to write, even as he combined liberal and postmodern ideas and techniques. Bradbury wrote in this way partly to document the loss of self and the loss of character but largely to warn against the growing usurpation of the human by abstractions of all kinds, thereby serving (as Bellow has said the novelist should) as the canary in the coal mine.

Sources for Further Study

Encounter. LXI, July, 1983, p. 89.

Haffenden, John. Novelists in Interview, 1985.

Harper’s. CCLXVII, November, 1983, p. 74.

Listener. CIX, April 21, 1983, p. 24.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. October 21, 1983, p. 32.

New Statesman. CV, April 8, 1983, p. 24.

Newsweek. CII, October 24, 1983, p. 121.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXIV, August 12, 1983, p. 54.

Virginia Quarterly Review. LX, Spring, 1984, p. 57.

Ziegler, Heide, and Christopher Bigsby. The Radical Imagination and the Liberal Tradition, 1982.