Here is Joseph de Maistre, jurist, philosopher, and grand
reactionary, in exile in St. Petersburg in the first part of the
nineteenth century, contemplating the figure of the Executioner, with
whom so many of his fellow French aristocrats had suffered an all too
intimate encounter a couple of decades previously:
So who is this inexplicable being who, when there are so many
pleasant, lucrative, honest, and even honourable professions in which he
could exercise his strength or dexterity to choose among, has chosen
that of torturing and putting to death his own kind? Are this head and
this heart made like our own? Do they contain anything that is peculiar
and alien to our nature? For myself, I have no doubt about this. In
outward appearance he is made like us; he is born like us. But he is an
extraordinary being, and for him to be brought into existence as a
member of the human family a particular decree was required, a FIAT of
creative power.
And here, quoted by Martin Amis in his book Koba the Dread (2002), is the biographer Dmitri Volkogonov writing of a particular executioner:
No other man in the world has ever accomplished so fantastic a success
as he: to exterminate millions of his own countrymen and receive in
exchange the whole country’s blind adulation.
It might be said that Martin Amis and Stalin’s
Russia were two things that were waiting to happen to each other. What
other novelist of his generation would have risked treating the
enormities visited upon the twentieth century with such vigor, such
moral outrage, such foolhardy daring? In Time’s Arrow (1991) he
found a novel means of tackling that most perilous—for the
novelist—topic, the Holocaust, by having his protagonist live his life
backward, from all-American citizen in the present day to newborn German
baby in the young century, with visits in between to the death camps,
where, it is discovered, he played a modest but not insignificant role.
Time’s Arrow
was a risk, but it succeeded. In interviews at the time, however, Amis
insisted that it was one of a kind, and that he was not a political but,
essentially, a comic novelist. The book, as he wrote in an afterword,
was inspired, if one may speak of inspiration when the subject was so
dire, by his friend Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, without which, Amis wrote, “my novel would not and could not have been written.”
And sure enough, his next novel, The Information (1995), was a return to the form of his great, sprawling comedies Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). Yet the world was too much with him for a full withdrawal from the arena of public history.
Through
his journalism especially he could venture at will into that arena,
bringing back hair-raising reports of what it was like when the lions
were let loose—all that blood, all those screams—but also essaying
wonderfully comic turns, such as his non-encounter with Madonna, who
refused to be interviewed by him because he was “too famous.” “Madonna
(I wanted to tell her), don’t say another word. I completely
understand.”
Amis’s observing eye is constantly abulge with amazement at the
wickedness and folly of his fellow human beings. He looks upon the world
with incredulous surprise, like a man stumbling befuddled out of a dim
restaurant into the acid sunlight and traffic roar of a summer afternoon
in a strange city. For Amis, something always seems just to have
happened, something not quite identifiable yet very bad. Or if it has
not already happened, it is surely about to.
When
he was born, in 1949, his father Kingsley was among England’s most
highly regarded novelists, one of the original “angry young men” of the
postwar period, whose comic novel Lucky Jim, published in 1953, was an immediate and huge success, and was one of the works—John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger
(1956) was another—that contributed to the making of a new kind of
culture in Britain. Amis père and his literary confrères, whom Somerset
Maugham famously dismissed as “scum,”
were irreverent, priapic, anti-Establishment, and, above all, funny.
Though
the same adjectives might be applied to Martin Amis, he at first
displayed scant interest in his father’s world, yet he admired many
among his friends, such as the historian Robert Conquest and the poet
Philip Larkin. He was, by his own admission, something of a feral
youngster. The photograph on the cover of the English edition of his
memoir, Experience, of a ten-year-old, tow-headed Martin striking
a pugnacious pose with a cigarette in his mouth, was an augury of what
was to come. It was Kingsley’s second wife, the novelist Elizabeth Jane
Howard—they were married in 1965 after Kingsley’s painful breakup with
Martin’s mother, Hilly—who took young Martin in hand and set about
rectifying his educational shortcomings and generally smartening him up,
giving him a copy of Pride and Prejudice. “That was when he started to read properly….”
Young
Amis was a quick learner, and his stepmother’s lessons were not wasted.
He abandoned the louche, flares-and-flower-prints teenage life he had
been living, chasing girls and doing drink and drugs, and went off to
Oxford, where he secured a First in English. Back in London, he became
the wunderkind of the literary world there, first with a job on the Times Literary Supplement and then, aged twenty-seven, as literary editor of the left-wing and at that time highly influential New Statesman,
where he met, among others, Christopher Hitchens, who has remained a
lifelong friend and political sparring partner. Later, Amis became a
feature writer on the London Observer, and a famously well-paid reviewer with the Sunday Times. His first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973), is one of the most impressive literary debuts since Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall.
The three novels that followed—Dead Babies (1975), Success (1977), and Other People: A Mystery Story (1981) —were
clever, funny, and baleful, and consolidated his reputation as a
novelist in the waspish and calculatedly outrageous tradition of Waugh,
Angus Wilson, and, indeed, Kingsley Amis. However, with Money: A Suicide Note,
published in 1984, Amis found a new fictional voice, a hectic,
high-octane, mid-Atlantic babble the haste and noise of which did not
conceal the high artistry by which it was forged.
Amis
had long been an admirer of Nabokov, but at the start of the 1980s he
became a friend of Saul Bellow, and it is Bellow’s influence that is
most directly discernible in what one thinks of as the trilogy of novels
Money, London Fields, and The Information. Bellow has spoken of how in his early books he was trying to be an American Flaubert, but that when he came to write The Adventures of Augie March he decided to let rip artistically, and never looked back. The famous declamatory opening of Augie March—“I am an American, Chicago born”—has a counterpart in the jazzy, nerve-jangling first sentence of Money:
“As my cab pulled off FDR Drive, somewhere in the early Hundreds, a
low-slung Tomahawk full of black guys came sharking out of lane and
sloped in fast right across our bows.” Readers at the time had to do a
double-take: This is an English writer?
Amis’s decision to
do his own kind of letting rip was a large one, and must have taken a
deal of courage. It won him a new freedom, and a reputation as England’s
most ambitious, most exciting, and, at times, most controversial
novelist. A number of younger writers saw in him an example of how to
escape the crabbed confines of English letters, and sought to write with
a similar freedom, irreverence, and energy. Money did for the writers of the 1980s what Lucky Jim had done for their counterparts a generation earlier.
How
have they held up, these novels which we may regard as the work of
Amis’s early middle period? The comic energy never flags, the metaphors
dazzle, and whether he is describing a dog defecating or the play of
light on a stretch of the Thames he achieves an intensity of poetic
specificity on a level with the work of such masters of style as Nabokov
and Updike. In the matter of character and plot, however, there is
overall a peculiar haziness, a lack of or withholding of focus, which
can leave the reader feeling baffled and slightly cheated. Even the main
figures in the novels, John Self in Money—“I’m called John Self. But then who isn’t?”—Guy Clinch and the talentless Keith Talent in London Fields, and the rival writers Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry in The Information,
seem not so much portraits of plausible human beings as marionettes
gesticulating wildly in the glare of Amis’s pyrotechnical prose. The
women characters in particular can seem thin to the point of
two-dimensionality, as in the case of Nicola Six, the dark lady of London Fields,
who is striking yet insubstantial, like one of those phantasmal Morgan
Le Fays we encounter in dreams. Amis could legitimately claim, in the
postmodernist way, that aspects of the novel such as character and plot
are far down on his list of priorities, and that his artistic concerns
lie elsewhere. And it may be that his disdain for the verisimilitude
that is a staple of novels by, say, Kingsley Amis, for example, is an
ideological artistic position taken against an outworn convention.
However, in his new novel, House of Meetings, the first since the widely criticized Yellow Dog (2003), Amis has subjected himself to a decided cooling-off. House of Meetings
is short, the prose is controlled, the humor sparse, while the
characters strike us as real, or at least possible, people. It is a
remarkable achievement, a version of the great Russian novel done in
miniature, with echoes throughout of its mighty predecessors. There is
the Dostoevskyan struggle between ill-matched brothers carried on
against a vast and unforgiving Tolstoyan landscape; there is a
star-crossed Zhivagoan love that endures a lifetime; there are immense
journeys, epic sufferings, agonized renunciations, unbearable losses;
there is even a revelatory letter, kept for twenty years and only read
on the brink of death, as well as a homely sister, called Kitty, whose
task it is to fill in this or that necessary detail of the narrative.
The
book tells the story of two half-brothers, both of whom are in love
with the same woman, Zoya, and both of whom spend terrible years
together in one of the labor camps of the Gulag. The unnamed narrator, a
decorated hero of the war against Hitler, who defected to America in
the 1980s and made his fortune through the invention of an item of
prosthetic gadgetry, has returned to Russia to revisit the place in the
far north of Siberia where he and his brother, Lev, were held as slave
workers from the late 1940s until well into the 1950s, after Stalin had
died. Neither of them had committed any crime. The narrator was
arrested, like many Russian veterans who fought in Germany, on suspicion
of having been exposed to fascist and Western influences while outside
the USSR. Lev was convicted for having been heard “praising America” in
his college cafeteria line (in fact, he had been praising “The
America’s,” his code name for Zoya).
As he travels on a rackety
cruise-ship up the Yenisei River from Krasnoyarsk and across the Arctic
Circle to Predposylov, a fictional city based on Norilsk,
the narrator broods upon the past, and in particular on his hopeless
love for Zoya, the Jewish beauty, now long dead, who spurned him and
married his brother. It is the beginning of September 2004, and news is
coming in of the Beslan atrocity, in which Chechen terrorists took over a
school in North Ossetia and resisted a three-day siege which ended with
the deaths of 344 civilians, 186 of them children. For the narrator,
then, present and past horrors play against each other in frightful
counterpoint. He broods on the plight of the children in the school:
They are parched, starved, stifled, filthy, terrified—but there is
more. Outside, the putrefying bodies of the people killed on the first
day are being eaten by dogs. And if the captives can smell it, if the
captives can hear it, the sounds of the carrion dogs of North Ossetia
eating their fathers, then all five senses are attended to, and the
Russian totality is emplaced. Nothing for it now. Their situation cannot
be worsened. Only death can worsen it.
He has already quoted “an old Kremlin hand”—in fact
it was Viktor Chernomyrdin, former Russian prime minister and now a
billionaire oligarch—saying “We wanted the best, but it turned out as
always.” Chernomyrdin was referring to a disastrous episode in the
Kremlin’s attempts at economic reform that he oversaw in the early
1990s, and his statement has become a popular sardonic proverb among
Russians. “They didn’t want the best, or so every Russian believes,”
Amis’s narrator bitterly insists of the Russian government, and also, by
implication, of the Russian people in general. “They wanted what they
got. They wanted the worst.” And surely Beslan was, if not the worst,
then very nearly: “It is not given to many—the chance to shoot children
in the back as they swerve in their underwear past rotting corpses.”
House of Meetings, though fiction, is a companion volume to Koba the Dread, and that book could profitably be read in tandem with this later one, for Stalin is the reigning fiend here, too. Koba
is Amis’s furious, Swiftian account of the terror campaigns in the USSR
from the 1920s through the 1950s, and, specifically, a denunciation of
Stalin, the “Koba” of the title. The book when it was published provoked
some mutterings regarding the weakness of its scholarship—even though
Amis had made no claim to being a scholar—and what was seen as his
naiveté in taking on such a subject in such a manner. Yet the book is a
powerful and not untimely reminder of what Lenin and Stalin and their
henchmen between them did to their enormous, vulnerable, and tragic
country. Taking much of its inspiration as well as its tone of moral
outrage from the work of Robert Conquest,
it is in large part a challenge and a rebuke to liberal and left-wing
Westerners, including, indeed, the young Kingsley Amis, who Amis fils
believes failed for too many years to condemn the horrors of successive
Soviet regimes and refused to place Stalin in that same circle of Hell
already occupied by Hitler.
It is one of the characteristics of a
novelist that nothing is wasted on him, nor does he let anything go to
waste. Amis tells us that he read a shelfful of books in preparation for
the writing of Koba the Dread; many of the same books inform House of Meetings. Indeed, the title itself is taken from the heading of a subchapter in Anne Applebaum’s definitive Gulag: A History,
in which she writes of the visits to prisoners that relatives would
sometimes be allowed to pay. Wives would travel thousands of miles, by
train, by hitching rides, and finally on foot, to spend a day with their
husbands at a designated “House of Meetings” on the edge of the prison
camp. One survivor described such a house, with its cotton curtains, its
window boxes of flowers, its two neatly made beds:
There was even a lampshade over the electric-light bulb. What more
could a prisoner, who had lived for years on a common bunk in a dirty
barrack, desire of this model petit bourgeois dwelling? Our dreams of
life at liberty were based on that room.
The same witness, the Polish novelist Gustav
Herling, noted that such meetings often went disastrously wrong, with
the men despairing of their sexual competence after years of privation
(Amis’s narrator recalls that his relationship with his “ladyfriend” at
the camp, which held male and female prisoners, was, like many camp
romances, platonic: “The only impulse resembling desire that Tanya awoke
in me was an evanescent urge to eat her shirt buttons, which were made
from pellets of chewed bread”). The wives, for their part, were
exhausted from weeks of travel and, in some cases, distracted and
guilt-ridden by the fact that what they had come for was not a romantic
tryst, but to ask for a divorce in order to break the damaging link to a
political prisoner, which made it hard to find work and get housing
back home. “I came to the conclusion,” Herling wrote, “that if hope can
often be the only meaning left in life, then its realization may
sometimes be an unbearable torment.” Possibly it was this sentence that
gave Martin Amis the inspiration for a major strand in the intricate
tapestry that is House of Meetings, for it is after a visit from
his wife Zoya to the prison camp that the narrator’s brother loses his
faith in life and life’s possibilities.
The story proceeds on
three distinct time levels—the narrator’s present, and the past before
the war and after the war—woven together with such novelistic skill that
despite the brevity of the novel the reader has the illusion of a
nineteenth-century expansiveness. There is a complex interweaving too in
the provenance of the brothers:
We were half-brothers with different surnames, and we were radically
unalike. To be brief. My father, Valeri, was a Cossack (duly
deCossackized in 1920, when I was one). Lev’s father, Dmitri, was a
well-to-do peasant, or kulak (duly de-kulakized in 1932, when Lev was
three). The father’s genes predominated: I was six foot two, with thick
black hair and orderly features, whereas Lev…
Lev is a stammering runt, short, ugly, his “features
thrown together inattentively, as if in the dark,” with a nose that was
“a mere protuberance”—“And when you looked at him side-on, you thought,
Is that his chin or his Adam’s apple?” Yet it is Lev, the hapless intelligent,
whom the beautiful Zoya chose over his tall, dark, and handsome
half-brother. Zoya, cheerfully promiscuous, was one of pre-war Moscow’s
great beauties, “tall and ample and also wasp-waisted.” She and the
narrator attended the city’s Institute for Systems together; at the time
he was twenty-five and she nineteen, “And Lev, for Christ’s sake, was
still at school.” So it is a severe shock when in the winter of 1948
Lev, not yet twenty, arrives to join his brother in the prison camp and
informs him that he and Zoya are married.
The
heart of the book is the relationship between the brothers, more
significant, in the end, than that between the brothers and Zoya. Lev is
a pacifist, who as a new arrival has the strength to fight his way to a
better position in the barracks. Instead, he contents himself with
sleeping on the floor, among the filth and the germs, to the disgust of
his brother, for whom violence is “currency, like tobacco, like bread.”
Lev becomes, therefore, a standing moral rebuke to the narrator, who in
the recent world war, as a Red Army soldier, had, by his own admission,
raped his way across eastern Germany, a fact of personal history which
at the close of the book will have a violent and tragic repetition.
The
book’s portrayal of life in the camp, if life it can be called, is so
horrifying that at times the reader will suspect that Amis is indulging
in a characteristic giganticism, yet when we check with the historians
we find that he is being never less than factual. There is, for
instance, the larger-than-life monster Uglik, one of the “janitoriat”
(the camp administrators) who makes a brief but horribly memorable
appearance at the prison where he has been sent, “as demotion and
punishment for a string of disgraces at various camps in South Central
Asia.” Allowed the freedom of the place, he spends a day diverting
himself by beating, tormenting, and humiliating inmates—Lev is deafened
for life in one ear by a slap from Uglik’s leather-gloved hand—then gets
hopelessly drunk and passes out in the open in forty degrees below
freezing, which results in him losing both his hands to frostbite, and
later dying of dementia. Turning to another one of Amis’s acknowledged
source books, Andrew Meier’s Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia after the Fall,
we discover that Uglik had an original in real life, a certain
Lieutenant Colonel Barybin, whose drinking resulted in his being sent to
the camp at Norilsk, where he, too, lost his hands, saying afterward
“that he did not realize it got so cold in Norilsk.”
Amis’s description of another set of monsters, the urkas or criminal class of prisoners, makes them seem like fantastical creatures out of Star Wars, yet they were all too real. The narrator describes the camp hierarchy this way:
At the top were the pigs—the janitoriat of administrators and guards. Next came the urkas:
designated as “socially friendly elements,” they had the status of
trusties who, moreover, did no work. Beneath the urkas were the snakes—the informers, the one-in-tens—and beneath the snakes were the leeches, bourgeois fraudsters (counterfeiters and embezzlers and the like). Close to the bottom of the pyramid came the fascists, the counters, the fifty-eighters, the enemies of the people, the politicals. Then you got the locusts,
the juveniles, the little calibans: by-blows of revolution,
displacement, and terror, they were the feral orphans of the Soviet
experiment. Without their nonsensical laws and protocols, the urkas
would have been just like the locusts, only bigger. The locusts had no
norms at all… Finally, right down there in the dust were the shiteaters,
the goners, the wicks; they couldn’t work anymore, and they could no
longer bear the pains of hunger, so they feebly brawled over the slops
and the garbage. Like my brother, I was a “socially hostile element,” a
political, a fascist. Needless to say, I was not a fascist. I was a
Communist. And a Communist I remained until the early afternoon of
August 1, 1956. There were also animals, real animals, in our animal
farm. Dogs.
The origins of the urkas, Anne Applebaum
tells us, “lay deep in the criminal underground of tsarist Russia, in
the thieves’ and beggars’ guilds which controlled petty crime in that
era.” Ms. Applebaum quotes Antoni Ekart, a Polish prisoner, who was
horrified by the
complete lack of inhibition on the part of the urki, who would
openly carry out all natural functions, including onanism. This gave
them a striking resemblance to monkeys, with whom they seemed to have
much more in common than with men.
In House of Meetings the urkas are engaged in a merciless “war between the brutes and the bitches,” as the narrator dubs it, a struggle between those urkas who wanted to join the camp staff and those who wanted to go on being urkas:
This was the year when the tutelary powers lost their hold on the
monopoly of violence. It was a time of spasm savagery, with brute going
at bitch and bitch going at brute. The factions had, at their disposal, a
toolshop each, and this set the tone of their encounters: warm work
with the spanner and the pliers, the handspike and the crowbar, vicings,
awlings, lathings, manic jackhammerings, atrocious chiselings. Even as
Lev jogged across the yard to the infirmary, there came through the mist
the ear-hurting screams from the entrance to the toy factory, where two
brutes (we later learned) were being castrated by a gang of bitches
armed with whipsaws, in retaliation for a blinding earlier that day.
Amis then chooses another animal image, more
horrifying and more telling than that of monkeys. He reminds his
stepdaughter, Venus, to whom the book is addressed, of how disappointed
she was when he took her to the reptile house in the zoo, because “the
lizards never moved”:
Imagine that hibernatory quiet, that noisome stasis. Then comes a
whiplash, a convulsion of fantastic instantaneity; and after half a
second one of the crocodiles is over in the corner, rigid and half-dead
with shock, and missing its upper jaw. That was the war between the brutes and the bitches.
Despite his refusal to fight, Lev survives the years
of back-breaking labor, the hunger and the cold, and on July 31,
1956—the novel is very specific on dates, which contributes to its aura
of authenticity—Zoya comes to visit Lev at the House of Meetings. The
jealous narrator, undergoing his own convulsions of torment, comforts
himself with the thought that the encounter between the beautiful wife
and her half-starved and sickly husband will surely be, sexually at
least, a disaster. And a disaster it is, though not of the kind the
jealous one had hoped for. He presses Lev to tell him how it went
between him and Zoya—jealousy and masochism being close bedfellows—but
Lev demurs, saying that one day he will reveal all, but not now. And he
is as good as his promise: years later, after Lev’s death, the narrator
takes delivery of his effects, among which is the letter—the fateful
letter, one almost writes, in the best nineteenth-century mode—which he
will carry with him for two decades, and which he will only open on the
eve of his own death.
The novel itself is framed
as a letter, or better a testament, addressed by the narrator to his
American stepdaughter. In the presentation of Venus and her now-dead
mother, Phoenix, Amis falls back into that narrational haziness
mentioned above. We intuit a complex, loving but difficult triangular
relationship here just as fraught in its way as that between the
narrator and Lev and Zoya, yet for some reason this part of the story
has been left, limply curling and underexposed, on the cutting-room
floor. Phoenix and her daughter seem to be black, but we surmise this on
the thinnest of hints. What the narrator’s American life was like, even
in general, we are not to know. Is this intentional? Does Amis wish us
to understand that nothing that came afterward could compare in
vividness with the years that the narrator spent first in the camps and
then in post-Stalin Russia, before his defection, when he reencountered
Zoya, divorced now from Lev but still in love with him? Certainly the
memory of those tragic years is suffused with passion and pain such that
anything that came after probably could not begin to compare—the scene
in which the narrator begs the now middle-aged Zoya to defect with him
to America is reminiscent, in its pathos, pain, and delicacy, of Humbert
Humbert’s last encounter with his lost Lolita:
I said I was getting out: America. Where I would be rich and free. I
said I had thought about her a thousand times a day for thirty-six
years. Here and now, I said, she delighted all my senses.
So the second question is—will you come with me?
There it was again: the sweet smell. But now all the windows were
closed. And at that moment, as the blood rose through my throat, both my
ears gulped shut, and when she spoke it was like listening
long-distance, with pause, hum, echo.
“America? No, I’m touched, but no. And if you want me to just kiss
goodbye to what I have here and put myself back at risk, at my age,
you’re wrong…. America. It’s months since I’ve been out in the street.
It’s months since I’ve been downstairs.”
Still, the missing American years rankle with the reader.
This is a small complaint, if it even is a complaint. House of Meetings
is a rich mixture, all the richer for being so determinedly compressed.
In fewer than 250 taut but wonderfully allusive, powerful pages Amis
has painted an impressively broad canvas, and achieved a telling depth
of perspective. The first-person voice here possesses an authority that
is new in Amis’s work. It is as if in all of his books he has been
preparing for this one. In his depiction of a nation stumbling,
terrified and terrifying, through rivers of its own, self-spilt blood,
he delivers a judgment upon a time—our time—the spectacle of which, if
it had been but glimpsed by the great figures of the Enlightenment on
whose reasonings and hopes the modern world is founded, would have
struck them silent with horror. Stalin and Stalin’s Russia have provided
Martin Amis with a subject worthy of his vision of a world which, as
Joseph de Maistre has it, is “nothing but an immense altar on which
every living thing must be immolated without end, without restraint,
without respite, until the consummation of the world, until the
extinction of evil, until the death of death,”
and in which, in the cruelest of Wildean ironies, the victims of
tyranny survive to become tyrants in their turn, destroying even those
whom they love most dearly. It is a bleak vision, assuredly, yet as
always in the case of a true work of art, our encounter with Amis’s
dystopia is ultimately invigorating.
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