SOURCE: “Comical Conscripts,” in Times Literary Supplement, May 13, 1994, p. 20.

In the following review, Flintoff traces the comedy present in Škvorecký's The Republic of Whores.

Danny Smiricky, a conscript in the Czech army, is a secret satirist. In quiet moments, he takes out his notebook and develops his treatise on officers' bullying techniques. Headings include: “Soviet bellowing—our model”; “Bellowing as an instrument of world peace”; and “Hints on how to be decorated for exemplary bellowing.”

Josef Škvorecký has enlisted Danny, a favourite old character, for his own military satire The Republic of Whores, an acknowledged homage to The Good Soldier Svejk (it even features comic drawings). For the first time, in this book, he banishes Danny to the third person singular, thus neatly evoking the loss of individuality which the army enforces. The narrative is not so compulsive as Hasek's; as the subtitle concedes, these...