Review: The Lost Embassy by Adam Fergusson

Hardcover, 287 pages
Published 1972

Borrowed from the library

Read April 2017

The Lost Embassy by Adam Fergusson

A few years ago, I read Republic for a Day, about the creation of the republic of Carpatho Ukraine shortly before World War II-- a republic that existed for exactly one day until it was annexed. The Lost Embassy is loosely based on the Carpatho-Ukraine incident, with the timing of the incident re-set to the first World War. In this version, a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire declares itself independent, the Austro-Hungarian emperor sends a prince to administer the place as a viceroy, and then the Empire is dissolved at the end of World War I, leaving the nascent nation of Carpathia the only place still loyal to the emperor. Carpathia is soon absorbed by Czechoslovakia, and ends up on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

Most of this is related via an extended flashback that constitutes the middle third of the novel. The first third is about a pair of layabout young Englishmen in the 1970s (despite the timing, they feel as if they came from a Wodehouse story, or maybe a Victorian novel, like Lightwood and Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend) who discover that there is a Carpathian embassy in London, the only remaining bastion of the short-lived nation, where every day an aging ambassador waits for an invitation to the palace that will never come. They end up having dinner with the ambassador and his wife, who pretend the men are nobility even though they know it's not true, so desperate for recognition are they. In the final third of the novel, once the flashback is over, the two men along with a female friend, actually go into Carpathia to track down a long-lost relative of the ambassador-- only it's the eve of revolution! (I think this is loosely based on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.)

The other major source for the novel is seemingly the late Victorian adventure novel, The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope. I say "seemingly" because I've actually never read Prisoner of Zenda, but at one point, the two protagonists compare Carpathia to Zenda's Ruritania, and wonder what Ruritania would be like in the twentieth century, and I know enough about metafiction to know that's a clue.

The novel is a mix of tragedy and farce. When the men have dinner at the Carpathian embassy for the first time, you laugh at the pretensions of the ambassador and his wife, but you also admire their quiet dignity. As Carpathia falls, you laugh at the bickering of the political factions, but also feel sad as every attempt by the viceroy to aid his deposed emperor is brushed aside. The adventure narrative during the final third as revolution comes to Carpathia similarly mixes farce and tragedy-- the description of our heroes herding goats across a minefield is sublime.

Sometimes it drags a little bit, and there was one or two points where I felt like Fergusson had glossed over a difficult bit because he wasn't sure how to actually pull it off, but once you get to the very end, you see just how sweet a novel this is. Good fun, and now I'll have to seek out both The Prisoner of Zenda and Fergusson's other works.