Sean Michaels was born in Stirling, raised in Ottawa and is now based in Montreal. He founded mp3 blog Said The Gramophone, which charted the rise of numerous indie-rock bands, including Canada’s Arcade Fire. Us Conductors is his debut novel and it won Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize in 2014.

Now published in Britain, the book is a fictionalised account of the life of Russian inventor Lev Sergeyevich Termen – or Léon Theremin as he was in the west. Termen’s best-known invention was the theremin, an electronic instrument with pitch and volume adjusted by remote hand movements. He spent 11 years in the United States where he was deployed as a Russian spy who could sign lucrative contracts and penetrate the western capitalist system to extract money from it. He took a Russian wife to America and left an American wife, the African-American dancer Lavinia Williams, when he returned to Russia. He did a stint in the gulag before being rehabilitated and inventing an ingenious listening device called “The Thing” which lay hidden for seven years in a replica carving of the Great Seal of the United States in the American Ambassador's house in Moscow.

In short, Termen’s life was so extraordinary that rendering it fictively was always going to be a challenge. In an author’s note Michaels declares that the work is full of “distortions, omissions, elisions and lies”. This grants him absolute licence though his early use of it is not propitious. When we first meet Termen it is 1917 and he is a student in Petrograd. The Russian Civil War is on the horizon and he is running away from Imperial soldiers who are firing on a group of protesting “Reds”. Pushing through an open doorway, he comes upon eight or ten “Chinamen” practising kung-fu. Cue a scene so implausible and ridden with stereotypes that its purpose can only be surmised.

The action shifts to the US where Termen arrives with a Russian handler called Pash. The inventor’s presence attracts the attention of composer and fellow Russian Joseph Shillinger. Soon Termen is living and working in the Plaza Hotel and being feted by the great and the good of New York society. Wurlitzer and RCA (Radio Corporation of America) court him, but shadows are creeping over his idyllic life in America. The Great Crash destroys the economy and Termen’s finances are soon distressed. Stalin is strengthening his grip at home and the relatively sympathetic Pash is now competing with two new and more threatening handlers, both called Karl. And in an episode that seems to owe something to the Mission Impossible films, Termen steals secret papers and kills a State Department agent in the process. The unlikely kung-fu practitioner is now an even more unlikely murderer.

The reader has known for some time that the combined pressure of all these things will result in Termen returning to his homeland. He is relating the story while locked in the cabin of a ship heading for Leningrad with the narrative framed around his love for Clara Rockmore, a former violin prodigy and future renowned thereminist. She had rejected his marriage proposal and married an American lawyer instead. On reaching Russia, Termen is imprisoned in Butyrka and then sent to the Kolyma gold mines in Siberia where the novel records such degrees of suffering that it is difficult not to become immune to it.

Termen is already the subject of a biography by American composer Albert Glinsky which Michaels praises in his acknowledgements. And perhaps the pressure of fictionalising the enigmatic and fascinating original explains his tendency to overcook some things and undercook others. In the first half of the book, his fictional Termen morphs from lovesick puppy to celebrity-listing bore to kung-fu killer. The remarkable Lavinia Williams, whose marriage to him was regarded as scandalous at the time, is a one-dimensional character with a bit part. Only Pash, the imaginary Russian handler, is entirely convincing: his business dealings and personal life shrouded in mystery and his power ebbing and flowing in accordance with political developments back in Russia.

Fictionalising real-life figures has been the subject of much debate lately. But most would agree that the power to distort, omit, elide and lie should not result in a novelist ending up with less than he started with. Unfortunately, that’s what happens to Michaels. Termen makes one last plaintive cry for his “unrequited love” on the final page and, frankly, one is a bit relieved to see the back of him.