Interesting family members not always a thrilling read

By Bradley Winterton
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Sunday, Dec 04, 2005, Page 18

Olga's Story By Stephanie Williams 412 pages Viking Penguin

This is the life story of the author's Russian-born grandmother. It can't be called a biography -- that term seems to be reserved for accounts of the lives of the already famous. Instead, it's a tale that aims to bring to life aspects of the history of the countries in which its subject lived -- in this case Russia, China, Canada and the UK -- during the first half of the 20th century.

But Olga's Story isn't a normal biography for other reasons too. The book has been researched, for 10 years apparently, even though a garden bonfire following its subject's death consumed many of the papers that might have thrown more light on various aspects of the old lady's life. Stephanie Williams had her memories of conversations with her grandmother, born in 1900 in southern Siberia as Olga Yunter, and her own father, plus her mother while she was still alive, told her more. She also has consulted archives in Russia, California and London.

Nonetheless, the book appears -- and you can't be more certain than that -- to be a "faction," or a fictionalization of factual events. For instance, Olga's feelings on coming into a particular room, or entering a strange town, are set down. Are these being recorded or creatively imagined?

I've no objection whatever to the latter procedure, but it's nowhere made clear exactly what kind of authority is being relied on for the details that are on offer.

To be more exact, in a literary biography -- such as Hermione Lee's magnificent Virginia Woolf or Selina Hastings' less ambitious Evelyn Waugh -- various events are described or recreated in the main text, and then, in the notes at the end, the letters, memoirs or direct communication to the biographer that these passages are derived from are cited. In Olga's Story there is nothing like that.

I should place on record here that I read an Uncorrected Proof Copy, something publishers distribute to likely reviewers a few months prior to the book's publication. Even so, it seems unlikely from the nature of the books and archives listed in the List of Sources that any such detailed corroboration could be derived from them -- they are either published books about the period, or general archives such as contemporary newspapers and directories. There don't appear any large collections of letters listed, for instance, on which the details of this narrative might have been based.

Imaginative recreation though it may be, the book does have its moments. The best chapters are those that deal with events in Siberia following the Russian Revolution. Olga's protection of her wounded brother Volodya, her gun-running to and from a town on the Mongolian border, the changing power-balance between the Reds and the Whites in Troitskosavsk, the local administrative center -- all this is well described and reasonably gripping.

Events in China, once Olga had moved there in 1921, are less compelling simply because there she is presented largely as a spectator rather than someone more actively involved in events.

Of special interest to readers in Taiwan will be the chapters on Tientsin (modern Tianjin), where Olga Yunter lived from 1921 until 1926, and then again from 1927 to 1937. Second only to Shanghai as a treaty port with a large expatriate community, it contained by 1920 some 1,200 White Russians, 4,000 Japanese and 1,300 British. Olga married a Briton, a manager with the British American Tobacco company, though she also fell for a fellow Russian -- a far more charismatic figure -- at a slightly later date.

This book, then, is reasonably detailed, eloquent when it wants to be, and dove-tails the inter-national events it covers with the life of its subject efficiently enough. But there appears to be little new in the history it presents, and though the life of its subject was eventful, and saw her in contact with sensational events, that life wasn't in itself especially important, and only at moments in her youth particularly spectacular.

Olga Yunter probably did do the things that are described here, and may well have even had many of the innumerable thoughts and feelings attributed to her. But she wasn't a significant player in world or even local affairs, and the story of China in the 1930s, dramatic as it was, has been told many times before, in both historical and fictional form.

For these reasons I found this book less wonderful than, for example, the great historian of China, Jonathan Spence, found it. In addition, the incipient drama that emerges from time to time sometimes fails to catch fire. Olga, for instance, decides to leave her husband Fred to his own devices in post-war Shanghai. But before long we encounter them living together in the UK, in an Oxford suburb. Her promised "new start" doesn't really happen, and there are several other would-be turning points and dramatic moments that in the event prove less thrilling than they'd earlier been made to appear.

Everyone has a family, and every family has its stories, larger-than-life characters and legends. It's true that not all families have members who experienced revolutions and foreign invasions, though regretfully all too many do. This book, however, reads like family history claiming to be some more significant discourse.

Of course it may well be the case that, as Andy Warhol said, we all deserve to be famous for at least 15 minutes. But it isn't immediately apparent why the subject of this book deserves to occupy anyone's attention for all that much longer, Jonathan Spence notwithstanding.