This is interspersed with introspective passages in which Danny thinks in long sentences of many clauses representing the movement of his mind from one related thought to another.

Like Škvorecký, Smiřický is the educated, middle-class son of a bank clerk, loves jazz music and has spent two years as a forced labourer in a Messerschmitt aircraft factory.

They fear that local Czechoslovak Communist (KSČ) partisans are planning a revolution not only against the retreating Germans but also to prevent restoration of the pre-war capitalist order.

In the ensuing fight Danny kills one SS-man and incapacitates one German tank but he gives a false name to the Soviet commander as he doesn't want to be misused by propaganda as the "hero".

Local young men including Danny and his fellow-musicians have a wry and cynical view of the older generation who run the town and try to organise an orderly and peaceful transition throughout the departure of the German garrison and arrival of the Soviets.

It portrayed KSČ partisans favourably and was unfavourable to the democrats they had deposed, but as a result of continuing Stalinism in the ČSSR the novel went unpublished until 1958, when it appeared both in Prague and in an English translation by Victor Gollancz in London.

Even then, ČSSR President Antonín Novotný and the KSČ Central Committee accused Škvorecký of "defamation of anti-fascist resistance and denigration of the Red Army",[1] copies were withdrawn from sale and destroyed, and the author was dismissed from his post as editor of the magazine Světová literatura ("World Literature").