Fittingly published on the 10th anniversary of Malta’s accession to the EU, this is the sixth novel by Salv Sammut, former GWU president.

Among the throng of people at the Upper Barrakka on 30 April 2004, preparing to celebrate Malta’s accession to the Union, he focuses on three persons with widely differing backgrounds and history.

Rebecca is perhaps the easiest to describe: she is a university student who took an active and public part in favour of accession prior to the 2003 referendum. She had her interest in the matter, because she hoped, and eventually obtained, a job as a translator in Brussels.

But there was another side to her: her father was dead set against accession, understandable because he was a dockyard worker and foresaw, exactly as it turned out to be, that joining the EU would be the death knell of the dockyard.

The second person is Ronald, a top union official who had his own personal and private views on the matter but as a union official had to toe the official line. How much this Ronald mirrors the author’s own history is not told: all we can do is to speculate.

It is the third person present at the Barrakka on that historic night in 2004 who is the most interesting and surprising. Although this is not presented until the very end, this person, Pavel, is the Czech ambassador to Malta (the Czech Republic, along with Slovakia and Malta, joined the EU on that same night.

But this person has a history: he was one of the protagonists of the Prague Spring in 1968 alongside Alexandr Dubcek, Jan Palach and the rest who have now become household names in their own country.

The book describes, at some length, what went on in Prague in those momentous days of the Russian invasion and how this young man got involved and became a protagonist and also how he lost his girlfriend in the ensuing Russian repression.

Apart from the presence of Havel, now an ambassador, at the Barrakka celebrations, I think his presence in the novel serves to juxtapose the hard experiences of a people coming out of Communist oppression to the Malta experience which had nothing of the sort.

Ten years after we joined the EU, it would seem the author is saying that while other countries joined because they had just come out of the hard experience of communist totalitarian rule, we in Malta joined because of a bunch of kids who were agitating for membership because they stood to gain from accession, despite the fact that they were making their own fathers lose their livelihood.

If the position of the author remains unclear, the position of Ronald, the union man, especially when he speaks outside Malta with fellow trade union leaders and when he confides to his wife proves what he at one point says: that there were many who were in favour of joining the EU but kept silent because it would not do for them to declare themselves in favour.

At the same time, while he defends Malta’s social services system to foreign trade union leaders, he also admits that joining the EU goes against the hunters and the monopolists.

Maybe the positions of the two Maltese protagonists of this novel explain, not exhaustively but sufficiently, the complexities of the Maltese choice.