A Writer in Russia - Rated 
Anyone who hasn't read the later works of Alan Sillitoe is missing much of the best new writing available today. Gadfly in Russia begins in 1967 as Sillitoe says goodbye to his family and drives off just like any other British motorist on a sunny June morning. But he's not driving the sensible family estate to the garden centre; he's motoring to Moscow via Harwich, Finland and Leningrad. A visit to the USSR is the only way that Alan Sillitoe can spend his Cold War impounded rouble royalties. During the next 5000 miles, the author is fêted by the Soviet cultural and political elite, but also nearly escapes food and alcohol poisoning, arrest for espionage and a near fatal encounter with a brigade of Red Army tanks.
Gadfly in Russia is a wonderful piece of travel writing, but it is also a real life Cold War spy thriller. Anyone who has read John le Carré's The Russia House must read Gadfly in Russia as well. The way writers and publishers were important players, witting or unwitting, in the political and espionage games of the period comes, if anything, more vividly to life in Sillitoe's account.
Like the best travel writing, Alan Sillitoe's book provides cultural and historical geography as well as physical landscape. And like the finest of Chaucer's travellers, Sillitoe is on a serious pilgrimage too. As he travels south from the Finnish border, he points out town after town that has been sacked and burnt; rebuilt and sacked again. Finally, we arrive at Kursk - far more holy than the shrine at Canterbury. For it was the Soviet tank victory at Kursk that turned back the Nazi tide and saved us all from an unspeakable future. Sillitoe, perhaps more than any other living English writer, acknowledges the debt we owe to the 26 million Soviet citizens who died in World War II. Near the end of the book, the author is in Moscow for the 60th anniversary of the Soviet victory in Berlin. Attending a concert that features Shostakovich's `Leningrad' symphony, Sillitoe finds that `Others as well as myself had tears on their cheeks.' And so should the rest of us.
Despite his literary status, Alan Sillitoe is a totally unpretentious traveller who picks up hitchhikers, picnics by the roadside and argues with traffic cops. Few of the people he encounters realise that the man driving the Peugeot estate has given a readings in front of the Soviet leadership. One of Sillitoe's dictums is `think complicated, but write plain.' I don't know of any other writer who accomplishes this so well. A wonderful example of this is Sillitoe recounting a waspish description of a fellow writer: `She wrote about "foreign working class" people because she was afraid of them in her own country, it being in any case more comfortable to write of them than fraternise in real life.' Putting on a non-judgemental mask, Sillitoe reflects that this is `a policy I could hardly blame her for, though it amused me all the same.' Sillitoe's final, `though it amused me all the same' is one of the most delicious hooded ironies in modern literature. One can almost hear Jane Austen's shade shouting, `Bravo!' It ought to be anthologised in The Oxford Book of Quotations.
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