Industry of Souls (Booth)

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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