Industry of Souls (Booth)

The Industry of Souls
Martin Booth, 1998
Picador Macmillan
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312267537

Summary
The Industry of Souls is the story of Alexander Bayliss, a British citizen arrested for spying in the Soviet Union in the early 1950's. Eventually freed from the gulag in the 1970's, he finds he has no reason to return to the West—he has become Russian in everything but birth.

Now, on the day of his 80th birthday, Russia has changed. Communism has evaporated. In the aftermath, information has come to light that Alex is still alive.

This moving story weaves together the events of Alex's life, exploring this momentous day, his harrowing past in the camp and his life in the village. And it ends with his having to make a personal choice, perhaps for the first time in his life, and the climax is shattering. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—September 7, 1944
• Where—Lancashire, England, UK
• Raised—Hong Kong, China
• Death—February 12, 2004
• Where—Devon, England
• Education—Trent Park College of Education (now part of
   Middlesex University in England)
• Awards—Society of Authors' Gregory Award (for poetry)

Martin Booth was a highly prolific British writer—13 novels, five children's books, and numerous works of poetry and other non-fiction. He also worked as a teacher and screenwriter, and was the founder of the Sceptre Press.

Booth was born in Lancashire, but was brought up mainly in Hong Kong, where he attended King George V School, and left in 1964.

He made his name as a poet and as a publisher, producing elegant volumes by British and American poets, including slim volumes of work by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. His own books of verse include The Knotting Sequence (1977), named for the village in which Booth was living at the time. The book features a series of lyrics in which he seeks links between the present and the Saxon past, and the man called Knot who gave his name to the village. Booth also accumulated a library of contemporary verse, which allowed him to produce anthologies and lectures.

In the late 1970s Booth turned mainly to writing fiction. His first successful novel, Hiroshima Joe, was published in 1985. The book is based on what he heard from a man he met as a boy in Hong Kong and contains passages set in that city during the Second World War.

Booth was a veteran traveller who retained an enthusiasm for flying, also expressed in his poems, such as "Kent Says," in Killing the Moscs. His interest in observing and studying wildlife resulted in a book about Jim Corbett, a big-game hunter and expert on man-eating tigers.

Many of Booth's works were linked to the British imperial past in China, Hong Kong and Central Asia. Booth was also fond of the United States, where he had many poet friends, and of Italy, which features in many of his later poems and in his novel A Very Private Gentleman (1990). These interests form a thread through his later novels, travel books and biographies.

Booth's novel The Industry Of Souls was shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize.

Booth died of cancer in Devon in 2004, shortly after completing Gweilo, a memoir of his Hong Kong childhood written for his own children. (From Wikipedia.)

See the Guardian (UK) for Booth's obituary.

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Book Reviews
As we accompany Bayliss on a tour through his present and past, this meditative, unadorned novel, short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1998, raises questions about home, freedom and the meaning of a life that resonate long after the final page is turned.
Michael Porter - New York Times Magazine

This is often lyrical and nimble, and accomplishes the not-insignificant task of entertaining and enlightening by means of literary narrative.
Boston Book Review

As he wakes up on his 80th birthday, Alexander Bayliss, a British citizen who spent 25 years in a Soviet gulag after being charged with espionage and the next 20 years in the Russian village of Myshkino, has a major decision to make: Will he remain in the village or return home to England, where his family has just discovered that he is alive? Through flashbacks to the gulag, Booth (Opium: A History) introduces Bayliss's fellow workers, from Dimitri, who always has a story or a joke, to Yuli, who is terrified that the coal mine they are working in will collapse, to Kirill, the leader who points Bayliss to Myshkino and in doing so portrays the human side of gulag life. Interspersed with this material is an account of Bayliss's experiences in Myshkino detailing the people he has come to know and how the collapse of the Soviet Union affected them. Relying on strong character development, this intriguing work illuminates the social, political, and economic changes the downfall of communism brought to Russia while remaining readable, personal, and suspenseful. Highly recommended. —Joshua Cohen, Mid-Hudson Lib. Syst., Poughkeepsie, NY
Library Journal

Booth is a storyteller of rare power who makes the unbearable understandable.... This [book] was a finalist for last year's prestigious Booker Award; it's hard to imagine how any of the other nominees could have been better. —George Needham
Booklist

Much published in England but known here only for his nonfiction (Opium: A History,1998), Booth offers a gripping tale—short-listed for the Booker—of the gulag and one man's 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 time—gathering it from Bayliss's 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 won't be told here, as neither will the cause of the special relationship between Bayliss—or Shurik, his Russian nickname—and young Frosya, who transparently reveres him. Why the villagers also venerate him, however, can be told—the reason being that even after a quarter-century in the gulag, he doesn't 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, it's the people who were there with him that one will remember: Titian, the math professor now imprisoned; Avel, who flew MIG's against Yankees; and, most especially, Kirill, the leader of Shurik's work squad,whose boundless humor, generosity, friendship—and terrible death—will explain why Bayliss/Shurik chooses to devote what's left of his own life to humble Myshkino. By turns terrifying and moving, an observant book likely to be long remembered.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Souls of Industry:

1. Start with the book's title—what is its thematic significance? You might consider the following passage:

It is the industry of the soul, to love and to hate; to seek after the beautiful and to recognise the ugly, to honour friends and wreak vengeance upon enemies; yet, above all, it is the work of the soul to prove it can be steadfast in these matters.

2. The novel opens 20 years after Bayliss's release from the gulag. Why has he decided to remain in Russia—the very country that brutalized him? What do you make of the fact that he never let his family in England know he was alive? What is his reason?

3. At one point, Bayliss says that "friends are more important than flags." Why might he say that? Do you agree...would you say the same for yourself? Or have Bayliss's particular circumstances shaped his thinking?

4. Bayliss tells his pupils: "If you kill something of beauty, two uglinesses spring up in its place." What does he mean...and how is that observation related to events in the novel? Can you give examples from your own life?

5. Having reached his 80th birthday, how has Bayliss attained inner peace?

6. In the gulag, prisoners are advised not to dream of the future or to remember the past—but to live only in the present. Why? That advice seems counterintuitive: it negates hope. Isn't hope, which by definition is futuristic, crucial for human survival?

7. Talk about the role of friendship in Work Unit 8. How do these bonds develop...and how do they help the men survive? In other words, what makes friendship so powerful? In what other circumstances is friendship critical for survival?

8. Do you have favorites among the teammates of Work Unit 8—perhaps Kirill...or Yuli...or Dimiti? Talk about the particular relationship that develops between Shurik and Kirill.

9. In the gulag, any belief Shurik might have had in a just and merciful God is destroyed. Yet the novel contains Biblical parallels; certainly the role of forgiveness, central to this work, is Biblical. Would you say that The Industry of Souls is a religious book...or nonreligious...or anti-religious?

10. How do digging deep into the earth and mining the coal work as metaphors in this novel? Consider also the excavation of the mammoth...and the men's decision to roast and eat it. What might that act symbolize?

11. What is the significance of the caged fox story?

12. What was most disturbing for you in the gulag sections? Put yourself in the place of any one of the men: what would have been most difficult for you to endure? Do you think you could survive, given the hardships?

13. The Industry of Souls is also concerned with the fall of communism. In what way does its collapse affect the lives of the villagers?

14. The book's chapters move back and forth between village and gulag. Why might Booth have chosen an alternating structure? What effect does the structure have on your reading of the novel?

15. Have you read other works about the Soviet Union's penal system, in particular Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago or One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich? If so, how does this book compare to either of those...or any others you've read?

16. Were you surprised by the novel's outcome? Is the ending satisfying? If so, why? If not, how would you like it to end?

17. Overall, what was your experience reading this book? Does it deliver? Would you recommend it to others?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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