| |
|
There were conjugal visits in the slave camps of the USSR. Valiant women would travel continental distances, over weeks and months, in the hope of spending a night, with their particular enemy of the people, in the House of Meetings. The consequences of these liaisons were almost invariably tragic. "House of Meetings" is about one such liaison. It is a triangular romance: two brothers fall in love with the same girl, a nineteen-year-old Jewess, in Moscow, which is poised for pogrom in the gap between the war and the death of Stalin. Both brothers are arrested, and their rivalry slowly complicates itself over a decade in the slave camp above the Arctic Circle.
As one brother, finally, writes to the other, 'You know what happened to us? It wasn't just a compendium of very bad experiences. That was general and standard-issue. That was off the rack. What I'm referring to is the destiny that is made to measure. Something was designed inside us, blending with what was already there. For each of us, in different ways and settings, the worst of all possible outcomes.'
That's the blurb. The novel, or long short story as was originally planned, is a very different and problematic beast. Where it really works is on Russia: modern Russia, a slew of corrupt capitalism, heavy-handed authority and no less violence and death than there ever was. (The narrator's present-day story includes the Beslan school hostage crisis.) And Gulag Russia, life in the camp with the zeks, is captured breezily and accurately, the horror of life there skewered even when it's too horrible to linger on.
Where it comes unstuck is the love triangle, which doesn't work. The woman is a cipher, understandable given that the narrator never gets close to her and most of the book is spent in the Gulag archipelago, well away from rational society. The crucial point, the conjugal visit in the house of meetings that ruins one brother and dooms the other, is opaque. It's revealed in a letter at the end of the book, and doesn't really serve to explain anything. The triangle isn't a triangle. It's a vicious rivalry, buried, which works very well but isn't explored enough as a plotline.
It's a shame because much of the book is genuinely great and certainly new. There's not a lot of Gulag fiction, certainly in comparison to the Holocaust, and the writing here covering the fights of the brutes and the bitches works particularly well. The narrator's one of those Amis characters that you don't like, you'd hate to meet, but you empathise with despite your revulsion. The stuff about the degraded soul of Russia and the attempted suicide of the USSR, which the narrator's awful life and reprehensible behaviour mirror, is powerful.
It's obviously a follow-on from Koba the Dread, which read like research stubbornly refusing to fictionalise. The galvanising influence here is the presence of modern Russia and the effects of Communism on the national psyche. And while it's some distance from being a total success as a novel, it's damn good. |
|
|
