SOURCE: “The Big Match,” in New Statesman and Society, Vol. 5, No. 228, November 13, 1992, pp. 34–5.

In the following review, Duplain lauds Barnes's The Porcupine as “a satisfyingly balanced book.”

When the party has fallen, the economy is in ruins, the atmosphere choked with pollutants, and the country's only nuclear reactor is leaky, how does the helmsman of the nation put up a defence? By reference to history, to the days of struggle when the party last found itself hard-pressed by the forces of reaction: “More than 50 years ago … I was helping organise the anti-Fascist struggle in Velpen. We were protesting against the imprisonment of railway workers. It was a peaceful democratic protest but of course it was attacked by the bourgeois-landlord police … we were sentenced to hard labour for our defence of the proletariat.”

Thus Stoyo Petkanov, former Communist Party chief in an unnamed east European country, on trial for...