In Review

21 November 2008 19:35 BST

House of Meetings by Martin Amis

Published by Jonathan Cape, out now, hardback, 198 pages, £12.99.

In a nutshell…

Russia. Death. Rape. Totality. Redemption.

What's it all about?

Written in the form of a letter to his daughter living in the US, the unnamed Russian narrator reveals his life story centering on his relationship with his brother, Lev, and their mutual love of one woman.

As he chronicles his life, the elderly war veteran makes a pilgrimage to a gulag in the Arctic Circle, where he was held with his brother, after the second world war.

The narrative is interspersed and linked with observations of contemporary Russia – 2004 – when the Beslan crisis is in full-motion.

Who's it by?

One of the world's finest living writers, Amis cuts a controversial figure in contemporary literary circles – he is one of the most successful popular literary novelists of the past 30 years, lauded for his verbal virtuosity but derided for arrogance, greed and misogyny.

Thrust into the media limelight early in his career for being the son of Booker prize-winning and knighted novelist Kingsley Amis, he maintained the attention through the success of his novels in the 1980s (London Fields, Money).

However, Amis was lampooned in the press for his divorce in 1993, infamously splashing out £20,000 for a new set of teeth in 1994, and for high-profile spats with writers Julian Barnes in 1995 and Christopher Hitchens in 2002.

As such, he became the bad boy of the English literary scene. He has been dubbed by the literary press the "overlord of the OED" for his witty, flamboyant and innovative style – but this has also been a feature for which his writing has been most criticised.

Critics of his previous novel, Yellow Dog (2003), lambasted what they saw as his verbal excess, overblown stylistic flourishes which clouded the prose's core concerns.

As an example…

The morbid: "Over here, now, there's no angling around for your male midlife crisis. It is brought to you and it is always the same thing. It is death."

The black humour: "This period of bourgeois calm, of progress and poetry and upward mobility, of no rape and no murder, is about to close."

Likelihood of becoming a Hollywood blockbuster

Unlikely. Amis is one of the most highly regarded authors around but his reputation has taken a knock of late. His last two offerings Yellow Dog and Koba the Dread were widely condemned – arguably unfairly – for their self-indulgence. And he just isn't as cool, and certainly not as PC, as Zadie Smith.

What the others say

"[The stylistic flourishes] are surfaces - but they rip and tangle, mimicking the braids and back-eddies of guilt and denial beneath, pulling us down into the various layers of metaphor and allegory, always warning us that nothing can be taken for granted… this can be wearing." - The Guardian.

"The narrator's voice is gruff, eloquent, with the measure of a stylistic self-indulgence appropriate to a man who knows he is writing his own last story." - The Times.

"Despite the caricatures and the indulgence of ventriloquism, Amis has produced a memorable novel and a memorable protagonist." - The Observer.

So is it any good?

While the horrors of the Holocaust have been well-exposed, the 20th century's Soviet humanist nightmare is often framed with the intellectual trappings of ideology and politics, a situation that Amis seeks to counter with House of Meetings.

His subject, broadly speaking, is the erosion of the human being under the totality Russia – a misery that did not conclude with the fall of Communism.

The recurrence of the Beslan tragedy, in a novel that has the savagery of the gulag at its centre, allows Amis to connect with other famous pre-Soviet writers troubled by the state’s violent hegemony, Dostoevsky and Conrad, whom he refers to throughout.

But the author's dominant strength, his linguistic prowess, appears to be his downfall in House of Meetings; the human voices present in Dostoevsky and Conrad never quite emerge through the narrator's letters, which are filled with supreme artistry but ultimately have a distancing effect on the reader.

Some of his stylistic swaggers are delightful – after a violent attack, the narrator is "badged with blood" and wrinkles in a frown become "the inverted chevron of care" – and it could well be the point that only a series of epithets can signify Russia’s unspeakable horrors, such as:

"It is strange that enslavement should have that effect – not just the fantastic degradation… but also the layered injustice, the silent injustice."

But too many loaded insinuations of this sort eventually begin to linger like a jumble of signs pointing to dead ends.

Nevertheless, Amis' writing is, as ever, of a superlative standard and he certainly does not shy away from the gruesome moral and psychological aberrations of the Russian experience.

Despite being challenging, thought-provoking and gruelling, Amis' novella, however enrapturing, leaves you wanting just a little more lucidity or direction.

7/10

Kevin Crowley