The White King

If The White King was intended to be nothing more than a story about boyhood japes and the confuction that adolescence brings, it would have made a charming read. It is, however, much more than this, for György Dragomán has succeeded in conjuring up not only a realsitic voice for his young protagonist Djata but also a sense of what it means to live in a country in which the state security services watch your every move and can take you away at any time.

Djata lives with his mother in a Hungarian town. His father, Djata believes, has gone away on business with work colleagues, but as evidence to the contrary gradually mounts he is forced to recognise that his father has been sent to a labour camp.

As he waits hopefully for his father to return, eleven-year-old Djata tries his best to be good and look after his mother, who, despite her steely hatred of the regime that has taken away her husband, regularly gives way to sobbing fits of despair. Unfortunately, Djata often finds himself in fights, scams and predicaments that test his mother’s patience to the limit.

In fact, Djata has a quite extraordinary number of adventures, most of which involve violence of some kind. If even half the things that happen to him happened to Dragomán (and there’s no reason to suppose they should have, given that this is a novel), then the author is lucky to be around to write about them. Djata is threatened by a group of brick-wielding boys intent on retrieving the money they lost to him in a game of chance; he is chased through a burning field by the twin leaders of a rival gang, made to stand on one leg by a teacher, and hit by, well, almost everyone he comes across.

This is a sort of ‘boy’s own’ childhood, but Djata’s longing for his dad, which occasionally manifests itself in moments of choked-back tears, gives the book its emotional pull. The White King could almost have been a collection of short stories, albeit one with the common background of an all-seeing governing Party, supply shortages and insidious fear, but Djata's quiet despair draws the stories together.

The most moving parts of the book are the quieter chapters: in one, Djata is taken by his grandfather – who he is only allowed to see occasionally – to a viewpoint high above the town, just as he did with his son years before; in another, he befriends a man hideously disfigured by smallpox. One morning he slips out of the flat to cut tulips for his mother. These are tender moments which give depth to the boy’s character and the novel as a whole.