Dark and Light Tales of Politics Played Out in Academia

In 1969, in the aftermath of the brutal crushing of the 1968 Prague uprising, the Czech writer Josef Skvorecky fled his native land and settled in Canada, where he founded a press to publish the work of his banned countrymen. The author of many novels, including “The Cowards,” “The Bass Saxophone,” “The Republic of Whores,” “The Engineer of Human Souls” and “Dvorak in Love,” Skvorecky dedicates his latest--the first he has written in English--to his fellow writer and former dissident, Czech president Vaclav Havel.

“Two Murders in My Double Life” is an odd book: playful in form, ruefully comic in tone, tragic in content. The title provides a clue to the bifurcated form. The narrator and his wife, Sidonia, are Czech emigres living in Canada, where he teaches a course in detective fiction at Edenvale College. Pleasant as the couple find life in this (relatively) paradisal setting, they still feel connected to the old country and know they will never feel entirely at home in the new. Or, as Skvorecky puts it in his prefatory note, “Before the Story Begins”: “The old country never disappears beyond the horizon, and the new one . . . will never become the open book that it is to those who were born there, and can read it with no difficulty.”

The bifurcated professor has two stories to tell, and he alternates between them. One involves the mysterious murder of a handsome ladies’ man, Raymond Hammett, the husband of Edenvale math professor Mary Mather, “who kept her maiden name because she was descended from the Salem Mathers, renowned for witch-burning.” Written as a kind of spoof of the Anglo-American detective classics, featuring characters with names like Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham, the Edenvale story depicts a petty, self-absorbed, vacuous world of academic politics, political correctness and sexual hanky-panky that is finally too silly to take seriously.

The second story, darker in tone and more serious in its implications, involves a case of character assassination. Back in the old country that the professor and Sidonia nickname Absurdistan, the editor of a scurrilous rag called “Kill Kommunism!” has published a list of people who supposedly provided information to the Communist secret police in the bad old days before the 1989 Velvet Revolution. Although Sidonia is a former dissident who founded a press to publish banned writers, she is among those accused of being an informer.

Although a former dissident? Or as the professor suspects, because a former dissident! For, as it happens, the mysterious list includes the names of no Party members but quite a few of the Party’s opponents. Under the guise of rabid anti-Communism, it would seem, the former Communists are still up to their old tricks.

Sidonia’s efforts to vindicate herself involve a lawsuit in the old country and a television appearance in the brave new world of North American democracy, where a lukewarm commitment to “even-handedness” and a bit of slick video editing, instead of clearing her name, merely muddy the waters: “Both [the] unproved assertions and unproved denials . . . [left] the same aftertaste in your mind: ‘It was probably not exactly like that, but there must be something to it.’ ” Sadder still, it is the literary and intellectual communities, including some of the Czech writers Sidonia had helped in the past, who are quite ready to believe the accusations against her.

The contrast between the two stories is explicitly stated in Skvorecky’s prefatory note: “North America leads, by a wide margin, in the worldwide statistics of murder, but North Americans have never experienced total crime. In Europe and Asia, millions of people fell victim to it, many millions in large countries, but it is not only the body that is murdered by this mega-assassin, it is the soul: the character of the community called a nation.” Unfortunately, the novel does not quite rise to the occasion of its grand theme.

Granted, the Edenvale mystery is a spoof, not meant to be taken seriously, but its comedy is forced and heavy-handed, and its characters are so thin and shallow, they lack the reality even of stereotypes.

Sidonia and her problems are more poignant, and her story points to some important issues. But Skvorecky is content to tell rather than show, to deliver wry, rather offhand comments rather than probe in depth. And so, we are left with a wistful, querulous plaint instead of a fully imagined work of fiction.