BOOK REVIEW / Beyond the edge of darkness: Tony Barber reads dispatches from Eastern Europe

WHATEVER other shortages afflict the people of east Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, there is certainly no lack of Western books attempting to inform them how they have lived over the past five decades. One or two have been written by scholars who have made the study of the region their life's work; a few more originate from journalists and freelance writers who have lived in the area and know something about it. Still others come from media folk who are based in a Western capital and have popped in and out of the darker half of the continent, seeing a lot of the airport, the hotel and the English-speaking dissident but rather less of the real lives of real people.

As foreign affairs editor of the BBC, John Simpson comes across on television as a man of experience, honesty and good sense. In contrast to some of his breathlessly inarticulate colleagues, he has often provided welcome insight into the problems of the former communist countries. He is, in short, the last person of whom one would expect a glib and misleading account of the 1989 revolutions and their aftermath.

All the more distressing, then, that his latest work, The Darkness Crumbles: Despatches from the Barricades (Hutchinson pounds 17.99), consistently misspells names, misdates events and, in attempting to render expressions in their original German, Russian and Romanian, displays a grasp of foreign languages that is, to say the least, shaky. What are we to make of a book which tells us that the landmark Polish elections of 1989 took place in August (they were in June) and that the first name of the Armenian economist Aganbegyan is Arkady (it is Abel)? Mikhail Gorbachev's summit with George Bush in Malta is said to have taken place in December 1988 (it was December 1989), the August coup-plotter Gennady Yanayev is named eight times as Yenayev, and the Romanian word for comrade is given as tovarich (it is tovaras).

Simpson prefaces his book with the assertion that he was one of only three people privileged to witness each revolution in turn. The other two are named as an American photographer, Peter Townley, and Townley's identical twin brother. Townley's photographic skills have justly won praise the world over. However, Simpson's rehearsal of his own observation of these events arouses the suspicion that he simply barged into one country after another, camera crew and interpreter in tow, and barged out again a week or two later, pausing in the meantime to dip into an O- level reference work on Eastern Europe.

There is, in truth, no substitute for experience acquired by living in the country about which one writes. This is well demonstrated in Trevor Fishlock's elegant account of his travels around the rotten Soviet empire, Out of Red Darkness: Reports from the Collapsing Soviet Empire (John Murray pounds 16.95).

Fishlock was the Daily Telegraph's Moscow correspondent when communism turned to dust; he lived in a grubby apartment compound for foreigners on Sadovo Samotechnaya Street (built after 1945 by German prisoners of war, it is known to its residents as Sad Sam).

When Fishlock describes how a merry blonde Yakut in reindeer boots forces him to dance the tango in one of Siberia's dirtiest, smokiest restaurants, we can almost smell her horrid lipstick and taste 'the kiss at my lips which landed with all the force of a warm blancmange'. I have rarely read a more amusing account of the sheer awfulness of travelling on Aeroflot: the bad-tempered stewardesses who bawl instructions to passengers as if they are labour camp guards addressing a convoy of prisoners, and the 'grey chicken legs and grey bread with little brown cups of sulphurous mineral water' which seem deliberately intended to induce prolonged convulsions in the stomach, are details that ring absolutely true to anyone with the misfortune to have travelled on internal flights with the Soviet state airline.

Fishlock illustrates the misery, tedium and illogicality of Russian life in a succession of vignettes that do not look dated even in the light of the collapse of communism.

Mark Thompson's A Paper House: The Ending of Yugoslavia (Hutchinson Radius, pounds 17.99) tackles something thornier, but, like Fishlock, Thompson manages to capture the diversity of his subject. As a writer for the somewhat zany Ljubljana magazine Mladina, he is strongest on developments in Slovenia, the little republic in the north which, belying its placid reputation, fought a brief and effective war of self-liberation last July. But Thompson also performs a useful service in his chapter on Croatia, reminding us that a contributing factor to the civil war there was the pompous nationalism of the government of Franjo Tudjman and the way that it antagonised the republic's Serbian minority.

The Bosnian pages were evidently written before war broke out there, but one senses, throughout, the whirlwind about to descend. As Thompson suggests, it will be something of a miracle if that whirlwind does not spread soon into Kosovo, Macedonia and the Serbian heartland itself.