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I must admit that my contributions here have been vague and slippery. I have read HOM, and I disliked it, although that's subjective and really besides the point. I'm not, I'll admit, in a position to criticise it properly because I read it back when it first came out and can remember little about it. I'll try and dig it out and come back with some serious criticism in another post.
To move on to what irks me, in a way that might be relevant here, is firstly this idea we have of the novellist as someone deeply in touch with the big issues of the moment, a philosopher, if you will, as opposed to the ideal of the novellist as someone who writes good novels.
This irks me because being good at a certain art form is different to being a good philosopher (with an authority on global politics): they are not mutually exclusive by any means (Beckett, Camus, Donne, Cavalcanti), but they are different disciplines, and the one does not guarantee the other.
So at some level, Amis being seen as an 'authority' on Islamism or 'the current situation' just because he's famous and has written some novels is a mistake - the fact that people are willing to publish his unreferenced, unsourced rants shows bad journalistic standards (especially when there are plenty of Muslim critics and essayists out there trying to argue for progressive politics within the various Muslim communities, and doing so with proper regard for exemplification and empiricism, and being largely ignored).
In this context - novels valued for the wrong reasons, novellist unqualified in politics given collumn inches - I find HOM particularly repugnant. I'll pass you on to this LRB article to explain why:
Martin Amis’s newest book, House of Meetings, is a short novel that purportedly describes conditions inside a Soviet forced labour camp. A sick and malingering prisoner is confined to an isolation chamber, where he squats on a bench for a week over ‘knee-deep bilge’. A blind-drunk guard, a woman-beater, spends the night outside at forty degrees below – and wakes up, frost-mangled, without any hands. The inmates hack one another apart with machine-tools. There are ‘vicings, awlings, lathings, manic jackhammerings, atrocious chisellings’. It’s notable that the first and last of these particular gerunds – ‘vicings’, ‘chisellings’ – have a specific metaphorical purchase: they allude to the male jaw. Reaching for an analogy to sum up the violence, the narrator recalls a crocodile fight he once saw in a zoo: a sudden flailing, a terrible whiplash; then, ‘after half a second’, one of the crocs is over in the corner, ‘rigid and half-dead with shock’, its upper jaw missing. Prisoners on prisoners, guards on prisoners, prisoners on guards: it’s peculiar to find a polemicist who – plainly – wants irrefutably to prove the injustice of the Soviet system but doesn’t at the same time take the polemical trouble to distinguish between victims and perpetrators of violence, and to deal with them accordingly. Amis isn’t Dante. There are no heroic, reasonably virtuous political dissidents among the denizens of his Arctic inferno. Instead, there is an endless round of indiscriminate tortures, indiscriminately administered: those justly and Islamofascistically severed hands, those sexually frenzied jackhammerings, those mechanically vicious ‘lathings’. Defacement and defilement are everywhere in Amis’s camp. They infect the language.
House of Meetings only ‘purportedly’ describes conditions at Norilsk, not because the account isn’t accurate – though it isn’t – but because description isn’t the novel’s purpose, which is to hope for the moral redemption of his sub-Nabokovian, ex-rapist narrator. At the age of 86, he is returning to the site of his internment on a less than pleasant river-cruise Gulag tour. He has gorged in America, he has had marriages, has made piles of money; now, as he crosses the Arctic Circle, his ‘eyes, in the Conradian sense, have stopped being Western and started being Eastern’. This is the cue for confession. He addresses his account to his perfect American stepdaughter, who can’t begin to understand the reasons for his twistedness. He tries to make things flippantly plain. ‘You see, kid,’ he begins, ‘the conscience is a vital organ, and not an extra like the tonsils or the adenoids.’ Part of his story depends on his relationship with his brother, Lev, an ugly runt who – he found, on Lev’s arrival at the camp in 1948 – had unaccountably married the only girl he wanted: Zoya, also known as ‘the Americas’, being curvaceously shaped like them. The old man’s confession circles and skirts a central event that is not fully unveiled until the novel’s end: this turns out to be a baroquely paradisal reunion between Lev and Zoya, which takes place – in 1956, with the camp rules now relaxed – in a small wooden hut known as the House of Meetings. On the windowsill the narrator notices something peculiar, ‘much magnified, now, by a lens-like swelling in the glass. It was a test tube, with rounded base, kept upright by a hand-carved wooden frame. A single stemless wildflower floated in it, overflowed it – an amorous burgundy. I remember thinking that it looked like an experiment on the male idea. A poetic experiment, perhaps, but still an experiment.’ Amis’s ‘experiment on the male idea’ wants to be the idyllic obverse to what he thinks of as the gruesome ‘Soviet experiment’. But, in its ‘amorous burgundy’, this sign of the male idea is pretty gruesome itself.
And it struggles to survive, because human effluent and mashed-up body parts are the base the book is built on.
It's not Levi, is it? It's not Nabokov either, and it couldn't be because there's no sense of humour save for forced-affected grim-chinned sarcasm, and it's not Dostoyevsky because with Dostoyevsky one gets a sense of hands being thrown up in despair, not someone blustering at you smugly. It's a banal load of blood and bilge, it's analogous to, but not as good as, your Hollywood slasher film or a shock tabloid story, and underneath it all is this tin-pot message of 'east vs west', with east (Communist here, elsewhere in the Amisverse Islamic) being evil and foul. And this is supposed to qualify as some kind of intellectual statement. |
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