Inspiring Older Readers
The Republic of Whores by Josef Skvorecky
Take a pinch of Catch-22, add a sprinkling of M*A*S*H and lace with a liberal dose of The Good Soldier Svejk and you might just get a sense of the atmosphere that pervades Josef Skvorecky’s The Republic of Whores.
Skvorecky, who died in 2012 at the ripe old age of 87 was a Czech-Canadian who split his time between the two countries, first arriving in Canada after the Prague Spring of 1968 was brutally repressed by the Soviet occupational forces. Perhaps understandably, much of his literary output was preoccupied with exploring the nature and impact of totalitarianism. But his writing was never wholly sombre or depressing and was always laced-through with a strong sense of the absurd and informed by his other great fascination – jazz.
Many people have remarked on the way in which this novel seems at first glance to be something of a homage to that other great Czech satirist and humourist, Jaroslav Hasek whose classic and anarchic novel, The Good Soldier Svejk, so neatly skewers the absurdity of army life and discipline. Despite the echoes of this classic – its shared subject matter and even the use of small cartoons embedded in the text – Skvorecky always denied the influence, claiming he’d never read Hasek before he started his own book. The similarities, he claimed, came from the universality of the subject matter and the truth of the central messages. It really doesn’t matter too much whether that is the case or not because Skvorecky’s version is so substantially different and I think smaller in scope that the links don’t need to be laboured.
What we have here is an intimate, warts and all – pretty much exclusively warts – portrait of life in a Czech tank battalion at the height of the Cold War as they go about their day to day duties of keeping up a level of battle-ready preparedness and ideological improvement. The shadow of their Soviet overlords is always there but the truth is that the little, more domestic absurdities dominate. It has to be said that this conscript army, with each man ticking off every day of his three year stretch, has more in common with The Keystone Cops than with a slick fighting machine.
We see the whole shebang through the eyes of Tank Commander and Skvorecky’s alter-ego, Danny Smiricky who is rapidly approaching his final days in the army before returning to his life in the outside world and a job in the publishing industry. Danny is a bit smarter than most but no more committed to his duties – like so many of the men he spends inordinate amounts of time skiving and thinking about women. His greatest fear lies in making such a poor fist of his duties that he gets slapped with an extension of his service time – a fate he only escapes on several occasions because the top brass are as useless as everyone else.
The bane of his life and the spectre that stalks the days for all the men is an absurd martinet of a Major who is inflated by his own importance and compensating for his inadequacies of physical stature by insisting on all things being done by the book. Given that most of the men have never seen the book, have no interest in it and don’t intend starting to have an interest, conflict is inevitable at just about every turn. Christened ‘The Pygmy Devil’, the Major is a great comic creation and enlivens every scene in which he appears – the author's relish in creating this absurdist monster is evident, not just in the vividness of his descriptive powers but in the extraordinarily indignant and disgusting end he gives him at the denouement of the book.
I very much enjoyed the book without really being knocked-out by it. Much of it felt as if it deals with issues that have been more competently covered by better writers and it’s hard not to make those comparisons. What it does do however is give you a real sense of being an insider on the kind of chaos that passes for organisation in lots of big institutions and what you suspect is endemic in outfits like conscript armies. The standout section of the book for me was the shambolic attempt to plan an evening of discussion around a number of books required as reading for the award of ideological badges that the men were obliged to undertake – not only funny but unnervingly convincing as a surreal farce.
Paper and hardback editions are available on the second hand market for not very much money if you’re moved to dive into the madness.
Terry Potter
March 2020