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Andrew Haydon
posted 21 December 2006

Martin Amis's latest novel, is, in short, the tale of a Russian soldier who, having returned, brutalised, from raping his way back across Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War, finds himself sent to the Gulags, along with his runty brother, whom he protects and, after a fashion, loves. It is also the story of how he falls in love with his brother's wife, and eventually rapes her after his brother's death. It is not a barrel of laughs.

The most authentic thing about the book is its unremitting misery. In this respect, it is quite unlike any fiction which Martin Amis has written before. It carries many of the hallmarks of the Amis oeuvre - the improbable women, the regular updates on characters' dental progress, and the much-parodied use of repetition. Normally, Amis's depictions of human squalor co-exist alongside a horribly funny commentary. Here there is very little by way of humour. There is only bleakness, accompanied by the strangely familiar voice of Amis's narration, stripped of its usual jokes, in the first person, offering definitive descriptions of how the human spirit responds to unimaginable treatment. And this is where the problems begin.

There is not much wrong with the narrative. If it were, say, Conrad or Solzhenitsyn - both writers who loom large throughout the novel - then no one would be batting an eyelash. The problem seems to be Amis himself. Of course, there is the simple-minded accusation that the novel 'lacks authenticity' because the writer has not suffered these horrors first-hand. Had the imagination at work here convinced, though, this wouldn't have been an issue. The problem is that the imagination doesn't work, and nor does the prose style. Amis-heavy (the opposite of Amis-lite) is the wrong choice of voice for an octogenarian Russian gulag survivor. There is far too much of the familiar Amis in it. Much of the business of the book consists of the reader, who assumes the role of the narrator's US-domiciled daughter to whom the book is addressed, having the facts of gulag life explained to them. It's not that the details don't ring true - they are clearly the product of painstaking research - it is simply that the way they are explained is too ornate, and too fond of the sound of itself. Consider:

Lev had just told me that after a week in his barracks - one of the most caked and clotted in the whole of Norlag - he was still sleeping on the floor. I feel the need for italicisation: on the floor. And you just couldn't do that. Down there churned a heap of spongy shiteaters, decrepit fascists, and (another subsection) Old Believers inching their way to martyrdom. And the smell, the smell... As the dark-age Mongol horde approached your city, it hurt the ears when it was still some distance from the walls. More terrifying than the noise was the smell, expressly cultivated - the militarization of dirt, of head of hair, armpits, docks, feet. And the breath: the breath, further enriched by the Mongol diet of fermented mare's milk, horse blood, and other Mongols. So it was in camp, too. The smell was penal, weaponised.

Images are over-elaborated and primped, where what is called for is simplicity and precision. Whole sequences often run dangerously close to self-parody. Where in previous novels Amis's linguistic fecundity, his felicity with a phrase, was not only impressive but, more crucially, accurate; here it feels like a man grasping for and failing to find a way to describe something beyond his comprehension. The following is a single paragraph trying describing how the gulags operated: 'The frequency of the total. The total state - the masterpiece of misery.'

House of Meetings was originally to be published together with two of Amis's post-9/11 efforts, 'The Last Days of Muhammed Atta' and an essay on 'The War Against Terror'. Instead the shorter pieces were published in the Observer to barely suppressed titters and House of Meetings alone was put out between hard covers. A good reason for not collecting House of Meetings together with the two more contemporary efforts is the sheer divergence between materials. In spite of the occasional nod to post-Soviet Russia - the Beslan high school massacre makes a brief appearance - this is a novel primarily concerned with the twentieth century. Moreover it is a novel that is wholly immersed in its absorption in Russia. It is a hate-letter to the country. The narrator, if not Amis himself, has decided that it is too horrific a country to survive, and believes at the book's conclusion that is slowly dying. The contrast between these dying embers of post-Soviet Russia and the fierce fires of Islamist terrorism would have served neither subject well. In spite of their common currency of death and terror, the comparisons which could have been drawn would have been neither instructive nor judicious.