BOOKS

By Paul Gray

THE MIRACLE GAME

by Josef Skvorecky

Translated by Paul Wilson

Knopf; 436 pages; $22.95

This is one of those big, demanding, convoluted novels that no one is supposed to have the time to read anymore. Furthermore, its author, Josef Skvorecky, who left Czechoslovakia for Canada after Soviet tanks put an end to the Prague Spring of 1968, displays a leisurely, literary sensibility, as if words on a page could still hold their own among sound bites and photo ops. Worst of all, the book's subject -- the lives of ordinary Czechoslovak citizens under the unpredictable pressures of Soviet occupation -- is already, given the torrential crush of current events, an outdated story. The tanks are long gone, and a playwright serves as the elected President of Czechoslovakia. Now what's new?

Well, The Miracle Game is, and those who adopt ready-made excuses for skipping it probably deserve the nothing they will get in return. Serious fiction affords an access to reality that no number of headlines or newsclips can replace, and fiction that entertains has the added advantage of making such knowledge easy to take. In large measure, Skvorecky manages that old- fashioned task of both instructing and delighting.

His narrator is the relentlessly randy Danny Smiricky -- also the hero of Skvorecky's critically praised The Engineer of Human Souls (1984) -- who habitually casts a jaundiced eye on the weird world of his birthright: a subjugated land where peasants bump elbows with intellectuals and the new dogma of communism has declared war on old Roman Catholic beliefs. Consigned in 1948 to teach the wisdom of Stalin at a vocational school in the rural Czechoslovak village of Hronov, Danny fights off a venereal disease contracted earlier and, rather unsuccessfully, the temptations of his female students. While he attends Mass with Vixi, one of the more importunate of his potential seducers, in the local church, a presumptive miracle occurs. Danny does not see it, but Vixi and other worshipers do: an 18-in. wooden statuette of St. Joseph apparently moves during the service. Initially, Danny tries to turn aside reports of this happening -- and his own status as an inattentive witness -- with a joke: "Signs like that appear only to heathens. Never to backsliders."

But soon nobody is laughing. Rumors about the ambulatory statue spread, and a local sensation quickly mesmerizes the nation. Feeling, quite correctly, threatened by all this talk, the Communists charge the parish priest with rigging the miracle to trick the faithful and discredit the ruling authorities. A more sophisticated conspiracy theory has the Communist Party plotting and executing the phenomenon so as to expose the church to ridicule, as well as charges of treason against the state. And there is a third possible interpretation: that the hand of God actually reached down into that obscure church to point muddled humans in the right direction.

Danny witnesses much of this drama, although he is not present at the cruel interrogation of the parish priest who is being ordered to renounce his vision. And the narrator remembers. Twenty years later, in what seems the dawning of a new age, Danny ponders and probes the meanings of that long-ago manifestation of the unbelievable, even while the liberal transformations of early 1968 miraculously unfold. Which is more unreal, that an icon should apparently come to life or that an entire society should suddenly find itself breathing free? The subsequent crackdown only makes the notion of divine intercession that much more appealing.

Danny's skeptical attempts to get to the bottom of this event keep The Miracle Game on a coherent narrative track. The detours, including wicked satires of some of the rulers and the ruled during the past 40 years of Czechoslovak history, are usually worth the time it takes to get through them. It must be said that Danny's relentless womanizing grows tiresome; the fictional representations of appetites, of whatever sort, require variety, and Danny is pretty much a one-note sort of guy. Still, sex is the last refuge of the oppressed, and Skvorecky has presented Danny as he must have been in the bad old days. Now that different days have arrived, in Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe, this novel is as good a place as any to read signs of what may lie ahead.