The Industry of Souls - Softcover

Booth, Martin.

4.25

742 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1899235515 ISBN 13: 9781899235513

Publisher: DEWI LEWIS PUBLISHING. STOCKPORT 1998, 1998

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The Industry of Souls is the story of Alexander Bayliss, a British citizen arrested for spying in the Soviet Union in the early 1950s. Presumed dead by the British Government, he survives 20 years in a Soviet Labour Camp. Eventually freed from the gulag in the 1970s he finds that has no reason to return to the West - he has become Russian in everything but birth. He finds his way to the home of his best friend at the Camp - Kirill - who he had to kill with his bare hands. He is taken in by Kirill's daughter and eventually becomes a local schoolmaster - much loved by all the village. Now on his 80th birthday Russia is changed. Communism has evaporated. In the aftermath his existence has come to light and a nephew is coming to visit him from England. The story moves from this day to his past in the camp and his life in the village. And it ends with him having to make a choice, perhaps for the first time in his life ...This is a power and dramatic novel that spans fifty years of Soviet history, capturing the repression and fear of the Stalinist period and the enthusiasm and sense of bewilderment that followed the eventual end of Communist rule.

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About the Author:

This is Martin Booth's twelfth adult novel. His novel Hiroshima Joe sold more than 350,000 copies worldwide, reaching number nine on the UK bestseller list. His most recent non-fiction books include The Doctor and the Detective: A Biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Opium: A History. An inveterate traveler, Martin Booth frequently broadcasts for the BBC.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Much published in England but known here only for his nonfiction (Opium: A History,1998), Booth offers a gripping taleshort-listed for the Bookerof the gulag and one mans escape from it. In 1952, on business in Dresden, the university-educated Englishman Alexander Bayliss is picked up by the Soviets, charged with suspicion of espionage against the USSR, found guilty, and sentenced to 25 years of labor as a coal miner somewhere above the Arctic Circle. The reader gets this information from a much later timegathering it from Baylisss own lengthy reminiscence on his 80th birthday as he makes his usual rounds of the Russian village of Myshkino, where, for 20 years, ever since the end of his sentence, he has lived with the devoted young woman Frosya and her car-mechanic husband, Trofim. What led him to the village wont be told here, as neither will the cause of the special relationship between Baylissor Shurik, his Russian nicknameand young Frosya, who transparently reveres him. Why the villagers also venerate him, however, can be toldthe reason being that even after a quarter-century in the gulag, he doesnt hate them, insisting that they did nothing to him. For Shurik, an intelligently avuncular Solzhenitsyn-figure who only occasionally becomes overbearing, there is an absolute difference between political abstractions and real people. And, as he reminisces back to the suffering, cruelty, terror, and death he suffered or witnessed, its the people who were there with him that one will remember: Titian, the math professor now imprisoned; Avel, who flew MIGs against Yankees; and, most especially, Kirill, the leader of Shuriks work squad, whose boundless humor, generosity, friendshipand terrible deathwill explain why Bayliss/Shurik chooses to devote whats left of his own life to humble Myshkino. By turns terrifying and moving, an observant book likely to be long remembered. -- Copyright �1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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