A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. – Graham Greene 

Jonathan had seen many things in his lifetime. As a journalist, he’d covered it all, been witness time and again. But when the Eastern Bloc began its collapse in the late 1980s, it was from Berlin to Bucharest and beyond that the hard-fought blend of calm and chaos led to something new. From the capitals of Soviet Russia and its annexed states flowed a combination of dissent and despair, and following after were new nationalisms and burgeoning ethnic conflicts. 

In the winter of 1989, unrest gripped one of Romania’s chief cities, Timisoara. Protests mounted and the surge of students and young adults drunk with freedom-on-the-verge met its resistance in the shape of state police and the sound of gunshot. In the wake of this chaos were the dead. In the wake were disbelief and nightmare. Left in the wake for Jonathan were memories of a lost friend and colleague. 

Two years later, the chaos and confusion have reached Soviet Georgia and Jonathan’s coverage leads him from the capital city to the rural valleys of the Caucasus Mountains. Independence and a struggle for power have thrown the new state into a limbo like his own—one between past and progress, between self-knowing and self-doubt.  

In the narrative that follows, Jonathan struggles to define himself in spite of the fortune and factors that have led him—his memories of a friend, a father, and his family. Like the country that surrounds him, his living in the past despite advancing through the future brings little consolation to the questions of place and purpose. While the romance that develops between he and Anna, his host and translator, briefly roots him in the present, the inescapable realities of his place in the world threaten to unseat whatever settlement comes. 

The novel’s concluding chapters find Jonathan in his Illinois home, living by rote fashion as his relationship with his wife deteriorates further. The question of their love is not without answer, but their continuation as a couple is. The same struggles for meaning persist and readers are left to answer for themselves: are these unnamed poisons the ghosts of Jonathan’s father, his colleague, his obligations or a youthful love? Most poignantly, is the section a precursor or a postscript to what the novel’s central character encounters in the mountains of Soviet Georgia? Is it the path before him or that behind? Jonathan’s efforts to outrun the founding experiences of his age are wrought with indecision and misdirection. Is he an old man afraid of dying? Is he a husband afraid of living? Is he one born again only to relive the past, seeking alms or understanding? Forgiveness and forgetting. 

The Way Here is a novel about time and place. It’s about one man coming to grips with his position in the world and the events, both real and imagined, that carried him. It’s about those that carry him still. 

It’s not about where you end or where you begin. It’s the way here that matters.

©2004 Adam Sopko