Waiting for the Electricity by Christina Nichol: book review

Waiting for the Electricity (2014) is set in Batumi on the Black Sea, on the western coast of Georgia in 2002. It covers a period of about 18 months.

The novel begins on 19 August 2002 on the Day of Turning, the last day of summer. Narrator Slims Achmed Makashvili – named after the character Slim Sherman in the 1960s American western television show, Laramie – is writing a letter to Hillary Clinton, the United States Senator from New York. He is entering a contest, sponsored by Clinton, to attend a business conference in America. The deadline is 7 January 2003, so he has plenty of time. He begins by writing her lots of letters which accompany his application.

Since the end of Soviet Occupation in 1991 it has been eleven years without electricity in Batumi – or very little of it. Makashvili, a maritime lawyer, is knowledgeable, but pessimistic and disenchanted with the lack of progress in his country. He has wanted to leave Georgia for a long time.

Makashvili’s 15-year-old brother Zuka is too young to worry about the country’s progress, and his sister Juliet is interested in the British consultant, Anthony. Makashvili thinks Anthony is petrosexual – only interested in oil. Makashvili’s 27-year-old friend, Malkhazi, is interested in Juliet – and reminisces about The Golden Age of Georgia, when Tamar the Great, a feisty female, ruled the country.

The first half of the novel is Makashvili moping about, depressively writing Clinton letters. The Georgian song by Raphael Eristavi sums up the tone:

Dust am I to dust I cling

I was born a rustic

My life is one eternal strife

and endless toil and endless woe

till life is gone I plow, I sow, I labor … on.

With muscles strained,

In all kinds of weather,

I can hardly live on what I earn.

And I remain tired and hungry.

The owners of the land keep tormenting me.

Even the little ant is my foe …

Makashvili receives a letter from the American Embassy congratulating him on gaining an internship in California for six weeks, to be living with a host family, where he will learn the managerial skills of a fish-packing factory in San Francisco with representatives from other post-Soviet countries. Was this a joke? He has no intention of working in a fish-packing factory. But he goes to America anyway.

He lives with Merrick and meets the post-Soviet members Sergei, Mischa, and Chemistry. Here he is blinded by the electricity … ‘so much electricity for only five people on the train.’ Not only does America have lots of electricity, it has lots of land! His exploration of it gets him into trouble.

The brief time in San Francisco (less than 70 pages) is ‘woo woo hippy-dippy.’ And then he returns to Georgia … The novel ends with the November 2003 Rose Revolution and the January 2004 election of President Mikheil Saakashvili.

This is a satirical novel – not caustic, but a series of one-liner put-downs and criticisms of individuals, countries, situations, and life in general. There are some comic elements, but little plot. There are only a few characters, but they are flat and not well-developed, except for Makashvili.

Overall it is one person’s dream to leave an unsatisfactory life, and the dream fulfilled – temporarily. Makashvili thinks America is ‘a boring heaven’  … but Georgia is ‘an exciting hell.’ But how will he cope with this exciting hell on his return? How does he react to his family and friends and, more importantly, how do they react to the ‘enlightened’ Makashvili?

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).