The Engineer of Human Souls

No matter how much you enjoy the books you read, it is rare to come across one that you want to return to again and again.

For me, The Engineer of Human Souls is that book, the one I would pluck from the shelves if I had two minutes to leave my house. ( I’d probably find room for Treasure Island as well.)

Skvorecky is a Czech writer, although he left Czechoslovakia for Canada when the Soviet army invaded in 1968. Before that, several of his novels had been banned and he was watched closely by the authorities. He was Professor of English at the University of Toronto for many years.

These aspects of his life – suppression and exile from his ancient homeland to the brash new world of North America – have informed and enriched much of his work (The Bride of Texas is based on a regiment of Czech emigres that fought in the Civil War and Dvorak in Love is a fictional account of the famous composer's sojourn in the USA), but he is a much more versatile writer than this: his downbeat detective stories, featuring the glum Lieutenant Boruvka are wry and amusing additions to the genre. His more autobiographical novels, of which The Engineer of Human Souls is the most triumphant example, rework similar themes and feature familiar characters, but this somehow adds to, rather than detracts from, their charm.

'The engineer of human souls' is said to be Stalin’s definition of the writer (as an engineer constructs a machine, so must the writer construct the mind of the New Man) but this novel is much more than a critique of a political system. It is, in fact, about almost everything, as the subtitle suggests: 'an Entertainment on the Old Themes of Life, Women, Fate, Dreams, the Working Class, Secret Agents, Love and Death.'

It would be hopeless to attempt to summarise the themes of this multifaceted novel further, but I’ll add a few more anyway: exile, tyranny, jazz, displacement, literature, the Nazis, young love, reminiscence, nostalgia, poetry, freedom of expression (and its opposite), jam tarts, botched espionage, Old Europe, romance, desire, the New World, hope and laughter, lots of laughter.

It is a passionate and honourable book, the heartfelt distillation of a life’s experience.