‘Under Budapest’ by Ailsa Kay

Reviewed by Kyla Neufeld

Amidst the chaos of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, a young woman escapes from Budapest and makes her way to Canada. Fifty years later she returns with her son to a city boiling with political upheaval. And beneath the city lies a network of mythical tunnels said to house prisoners of the revolution. Aisla Kay’s debut novel, Under Budapest, is a family drama, a crime thriller, and a war novel all in one.

As Kay, who lives in Fergus, Ontario, and whose work has appeared in literary journals like Exile and The New Quarterly, states on her website that “the Budapest of Under Budapest is both real, and richly imaginary.” While her characters are fictional, the political backdrop of the novel’s setting is very real. In 2010, Budapest held a parliamentary election in which Jobbik, the far-right populist party, won an unexpected number of seats. The party is anti-Roma and anti-Semitic and included these prejudices in its campaign. Kay’s native Hungarian characters carry and express such racist notions.

The other political backdrop to Under Budapest is the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, which was an attempt to overthrow the Soviet-backed Communist government. Though the Revolution began as a student demonstration, it attracted thousands of people, all of whom marched through central Budapest to the Parliament Building. During this time the revolutionaries executed many Pro-Soviet communists and members of the ÁVH, the State Security Police, and over 200,000 Hungarians fled the country. Kay dedicates one chapter of the novel to portraying the gruesome realities of these events.

It is into these two backdrops that Kay introduces her characters: Janos, Tibor, and Agnes. All from Toronto, each has a different reason for travelling to Budapest and each is transformed by what happens there.

The novel is broken into eight chapters to divide the different narratives of its characters. The first is narrated by Janos Hagy. When we first meet him, he is two months into a year-long stay in Budapest. Janos, who is only twenty years old, is always coming up with the next brilliant business venture to get rich quick. Though originally from Budapest, his parents left “because it used to be communist and oppressive,” and opened a Hungarian restaurant in Toronto. Janos spends his time running around Budapest with his best Hungarian friend, Csaba, looking for the next party: “A real, premium Budapest night, that’s what I want. Get high, get laid.”

Readers may be turned off from reading further because of Janos’s particular vernacular, which is littered with slang and profanity, but it is important that Janos’s voice is heard for two reasons.

First, Janos is an exploration of the apathy of the contemporary generation. His generation is too young to remember anything about the Hungarian Revolution; their lives haven’t been touched by it. Instead, they go to parties in old, abandoned buildings, called romkocsama. As Janos says of one, it “must have been a super-rich apartment building in the old days before communism but now there’s just us cool people hanging out on old sofas and grandma chairs.” Janos thinks that the concept of using abandoned apartment buildings is “cool,” but he doesn’t consider the reason behind the abandonment; his voice represents this generation that doesn’t give the Revolution a second thought because, though Hungary used to be communist, “in 2010 it’s not.”

Second, it is important that Janos’s voice is heard because he is murdered within the first hundred pages. In an effort to make some money Janos does a favour for Csaba’s brother Laci, in which he gets involved with some dangerous people and the favour goes wrong. One chapter is all we get from him. But, even though it happens so soon, Janos’s murder sets up events and characters that weave throughout the rest of the novel and Agnes and Tibor’s narratives.

Tibor Roland, a history professor at the University of Toronto, is travelling to Budapest for a conference, or so he tells his mother, Agnes; he is really going to escape the messy end of his affair with his best friend’s wife and decides that presenting a paper at the conference, something “he’d always excelled at,” is just the cure. However, Tibor does not get much of a chance to enjoy the conference. During a jog on the morning he is scheduled to present, he overhears the murder: Janos begging for his life, the sound of the axe. When Tibor finally goes to the police, he discovers that the voice of one of the detectives matches the voice of one of the murderers. Added to the mounting information—Tibor was at the same romkocsama as Janos—Tibor spends the rest of his trip paranoid that he is being framed, and he searches for a way to clear his name.

Tibor does not paint a sympathetic character, mostly because he is dismissive of his mother’s past experiences. For example, on the way to visit a cemetery, Tibor talks about the history of the subway and the rationale for why the tunnel was built so deep in the ground. In response to this, Agnes says, “They built it so deep so the top party officials and their families could be kept safe in case of a nuclear attack… That’s why they went down so far,” to which Tibor says, “Well, that was the rumour circulating, yes.” Tibor is an historian; his knowledge of the Hungarian Revolution comes from books. His mother, however, was actually there and this becomes a point of contention between the two of them. While she has not been open about her experiences in Budapest, Tibor does not consider that she may have knowledge that he doesn’t.

While Janos and Tibor’s narratives provide intrigue and a quicker paced plotline, Agnes’s story is the heart of the novel. Hers is a story of survival, of escaping an unstable country in the midst of war, and searching for what was lost: her younger sister, Zsofi, whom she left behind in 1956. What inspires Agnes’s trip back to Budapest is a claim from Dorottya, a Hungarian woman she met at a funeral, that Dorottya had been imprisoned with Zsofi and they had escaped through the tunnels. And when Agnes finds out that Tibor is planning on travelling to Budapest for a conference, she decides to go with him and search for evidence of the tunnels.

Agnes does not tell Tibor her reasons for returning to Budapest. While he sinks deeper into paranoia, she conducts her search. For example, while at the cemetery, Agnes finds the mausoleum Dorottya said held an entrance to the tunnels. She tries to enter and, when she finds that the doors are locked, she reasons that the doors would not be locked if the mausoleum was only holding bones: “It isn’t proof, nor is it proof to the contrary.” Agnes is desperate for news of Zsofi, for evidence that she may still be alive, because of the guilt she feels over leaving her behind.

Agnes’s search ends up fruitless, but Kay shows us what happened to Zsofi after Agnes left. Two chapters are devoted to the days of the Revolution: we see a young Agnes preparing her escape and Zsofi caught up in the revels of the revolution. To Agnes, ending up with no real evidence of the tunnels is cathartic and she is finally able to accept that she will never know exactly what had happened to her sister: “Perhaps Zsofi had escaped with Dorottya to Vienna, only to suffer a more ordinary violent death… but what Agnes knew, what she had always known, was that Zsofi was dead. How it happened, when it happened, who did it—all these questions were inconsequential, in the end.” With acceptance comes courage, and Agnes finally tells Tibor about her experiences in the Revolution, which causes Tibor to understand how his mother had been shaped by her experiences, and how those experiences now shape him.

In Under Budapest, Kay portrays a colourful, gritty city and complex characters. Janos shows us the underbelly of modern-day Budapest, the parties and the unfortunate criminal life of the city. Tibor, who is not cast in the best light, ultimately redeems himself when he comes to accept the validity of his mother’s experiences. Agnes carries the novel with her compelling story as she searches for her sister and guides us through the early days of the Revolution. These characters and events come together in an exceptional novel of family and war, of intimate loss and gain.

Goose Lane | 264 pages |  $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-0864926814