The strange tale of the Czechs in Siberia, as told by a British novelist
10.9.2006 - 00:05
The award-winning recent novel, "The People's Act of Love", by the British writer James Meek, has an amazing cast of characters. It is set in the vast isolation of Siberia in 1919. At the height of the Russian Civil War, it brings together an escapee from a prison somewhere in the far north, a small fundamentalist Christian sect, who believe in castration as a liberation from the temptations of this world, and a company of Czech and Slovak soldiers, marooned thousands of miles from home by the dramatic events of the time; and the backdrop is one of revolution and civil war. For James Meek, this strange constellation of events and characters was irresistible.
