EXPO 58

 Author :  Jonathan Coe

Publisher : Viking (Penguin group), Year 2013, Pages 266

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Excerpts:

( ) After that, their conversation flowed more easily. Anneke told him that she came from Londerzeel, a village to the northwest of Brussels, where she still lived with her parents. She was one of 280 young women who were lucky enough to have been chosen as hostesses. All of them spoke four languages – French, Dutch, German and English.

( ) Entering the Brittania that evening, Thomas realised that it was the last time he would ever set foot in the place. In two months’ time, when the Expo was over, it would cease to exist; at least, he assumed so. If there were any plans to preserve or relocate it, nobody had told him about them.

( ) There were enough right and left turns, in random succession, for him to suspect that they were being taken mainly to confuse him. During the last quarter of an hour or so the roads seemed to become narrower and less reliable with many bumps and lurches. Tomas and Wilkins would have been violently thrown from side to side, if they had not been wedged so tightly together.

 ( ) These people waiting to be served at the bar, and sitting at the tables, were they real, or were they fake ? Were any of them as they seemed? A few days ago he had believed that Mr Chersky, whose arrival he was awaiting now, was a friendly young Muscovite writer and journalist who wanted his editorial advice; now, apparently he was supposed to accept that he was a top-ranking officer in the KGB.

( ) Manchester University’s large transistor-based computer had arrived more than a week ago- replacing the ill-fate replica ZETA machine as the most prominent scientific item on display.

( ) Inside every one of these is a little blue paper sachet, for the salt. Longman was using his position to get access to documents in the American pavilion offices, then transferring them onto microfilm, then putting them into one of these little sachets and passing them on to the bar-maid.

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My Take:  The Book is from collected facts; told as a narrative featuring a clerk from a British government office, posted for duty to the British pavilion of the Brussels exhibition of 1958, where he is involved in love triangle, tame Russian spying attempts etc. Contains all the activities of a spy story, but is not as fast paced as the Bond stories.

Subject Type – Mixture of history & personal life

Narrative  Style – Fair

Readability – Good

Maintaining Readers interest – Fair

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