Someone once said of Woody Allen that he never says anything funny himself but waits for others to utter a witticism and then writes it down.  
Bulgarian author Alek Popov seems very similar. He’s a quietly spoken and self-effacing individual in his early 40s. Like most talented writers, he’s a keen social observer but a person who shirks self-publicity.

When we meet in a Sofia cafe, Popov has just come from the film set. Filming has been underway for most of the summer on a screenplay adapted by Popov from his novel, Mission London, first published eight years ago to great critical acclaim and re-printed five times.

The novel is perhaps best described as a social commentary on British and Bulgarian mores. It’s based on Popov’s two-year posting as cultural attache at London’s Bulgarian embassy.

I ask if the actors’ representations live up to the characters as he conceived them. Popov is one to deliberate carefully. Ask him a question and his eyes start to roll, he averts his gaze, his brow furrows and a 10-second pause ensues. Then he’ll break out into an amused smile. "Seeing actors portray the characters is always different from your conceptions.

You have to be prepared for a big difference between what you think or imagine and what is produced. Sometimes they can change for the better. I feel quite confident that - after eight years - I have now developed a pretty good distance from the novel," he says.

Popov arrived in the UK at a defining moment - in 1997 - just in time to view first-hand the outpouring of grief surrounding the death of Princess Diana. "It was really impressive but also kind of absurd. I watched all the coverage avidly. The Bulgarian embassy is close to Kensington Palace, so every day I was wandering around and reading all these tributes. It was a very interesting experience," says Popov, in such a thoughtful way that you feel he may have more material floating around in the recesses of his mind.

Scale but no style
Popov started writing when he was at school; his early influences were Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville and English ghost stories. He continued during the communist era when the state tended to subsidise authors. As with most beginners, it was concrete experience, not flights of fancy, that eventually bore fruit. "The material started to accumulate," he says of his stint at the embassy.

"At the beginning I didn’t want to write about it; I had other plans for my work, but then the material snowballed." The book had quite a long gestation period; only about two years later did he start to put pen to paper. "I didn’t write while I was at the embassy. One of the reasons I quit the job was that I wasn’t very satisfied with the lack of time I had for my own output," he says.

Popov describes the book as "critical of the new Bulgarian elites, in particular their vanity and obsession with image. This is evident in the West as well, but in Bulgaria they adopted only the most superficial aspects of Western culture. So they were trying to project something modern and refined but, in reality, very tasteless. It’s a satire on Bulgarian and British life, revealing the self-deception of both societies".

Culture clash permeates the novel. "One of the major issues to me was the meeting between East and West interspersed with some British peculiarities, which are very acute, in my opinion. This is illustrated through certain characters, such as Sibling, the director of a PR agency," - played in the movie by Alan Ford - "who’s a strange mixture of refinement and rudeness. Particularly when it comes to money, the British can be very stubborn and guarded," says Popov.  

It’s difficult for any nationality to picture themselves as others see them. So Popov offers further enlightenment for Brits like me who lack self-knowledge. "It comes from the era of Protestantism. This kind of English culture is rooted in Puritanism and Oliver Cromwell," Popov says, perhaps a shade esoterically. "This was when the British character was created. It’s different from other Western European nations."

Perceptions go both ways, however. One character in the novel, Sir Dean Carver, a Labour MP and lobbyist (played in the movie by David Collings (see page 16) used to be friendly with Bulgaria’s communist leaders - in particular Todor Zhivkov. Carver reflects, perhaps a shade ruefully, that "the old rulers of Bulgaria lacked style, but they had scale.

They used to live like barons".