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Ivan Klma described the 2009 novel Three Faces of an Angel by Ji Pehe as one of the most outstanding Czech novels since the fall of communism. The book is not only an epic and dramatic journey through the life of one family in the twentieth century, but also a reflection on many of the issues of our time. If you are more familiar with Ji Pehe as a political scientist, you may also be surprised to find that it even reflects in some detail on the nature of angels. David Vaughan talks to the writer.

Ji Pehe, photo: David Vaughan Ji Pehe is one of the Czech Republics best known political commentators and over the last two decades we have spoken with him on many subjects here on Radio Prague. He worked closely with President Havel and since 1999 he has been director of the New York University in Prague. He has also written three novels, and the most recent, Three Faces of an Angel, has just been published in English translation. The book is in three sections. The first is narrated in the form of a letter to his mother by Joseph Brehme and takes us through the tumultuous first decades of the twentieth century. The second is told by his daughter Hanna, who as a teenager spends three years in hiding during World War Two. Her son Alex narrates the final section. Like the author himself he is a successful political scientist, a Czech migr living in the United States, but he becomes increasingly aware of the emptiness of his life. The lives of all three narrators are connected by the mysterious figure of the angel Ariel. I began my conversation with Ji Pehe by suggesting that angels are a rather unusual subject for a political scientist.

I think that political science and angels do not exclude each other. I was trying to make a point that the entire twentieth century was a struggle between rationalism and the limits of human reason and thats why we went through all the calamities and catastrophes of the twentieth century, because of human reason getting out of control and failing to see any limits.

The book is in three sections and tells the story of three generations of one highly dysfunctional family. One of the things that the three narrators have in common is that they all, at a crucial point in their lives, see an angel. This is the angel Ariel, which does appear very briefly in the Hebrew Bible, but remains rather mysterious. What inspired you to choose this vague and ambiguous angel figure?

We see angels as good beings, as our guardians, but angels, in various biblical explanations, are not always good beings. There are good angels, but there are also fallen angels, and certainly I think that the world of angels is as complicated as the human world. And above all, I really was interested in showing that God may be ambiguous in how he/it/she sees this world. If angels are his left or right hand, then some of them also may be ambiguous. Ariel certainly is one of the most ambiguous angels, because its one of the angels which fell from Gods grace very early on and was made responsible for the Earth. I wanted to put the human world into contrast with an angel that looks maybe with a degree of horror at what the human race did with Gods creation.

It is rather unusual for a Czech political scientist to talk about God as someone or something that exists.

In the Czech Lands very few people are willing to talk openly about God as something that exists, that they accept, that they see as an inherent part of this world. I thought that maybe I should step out and make it clear that talking about God openly is something that we can do in the Czech Lands without feeling ashamed.

I grab onto the wash-hand basin to stop myself from falling over and at that moment there seems to be more light in the bathroom. I look up and I almost cry out in amazement because instead of my face in the mirror there appears some sort of space. It strikes me that this is like looking out of an open window. Quite simply there is another room beyond the mirror. It is not like anything Ive ever seen before and it is empty apart from a table in the middle of it. It is diffused with a weird milky-white radiance.

Then I notice a silhouette standing by the table. It was almost hidden somehow in that bright light so that it wasnt immediately visible. Now I do really yell out in fear particularly when it moves. Its back is turned to me and it is slowly turning. At first its features are out of focus but then I see the figures face with absolute clarity. It reminds me of someone.

The plot of the book includes many of the traumatic events that have beset Central Europe over the twentieth century. You start at the beginning of the century with the death of Dvok, you have the Russian-Japanese War, the First World War, then the extraordinary story of the Czech Legionaries in Siberia, you have the collapse of the First Czechoslovak Republic, the wartime occupation, the Holocaust, the rise of communism, and then you move onto the fall of communism and even beyond that. And the book ends on the eve of 9/11. Its an epic and rather bleak picture of twentieth century history, not just in Central Europe. But you see a place for God in this picture.

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Ji Pehe and a novel that pits angels against the isms of our age