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	Alfred A. Knopf House of Meetings By Martin Amis Alfred A. Knopf 256 pages. $23

The Bare Bones

Little is left to the imagination in Martin Amis' new novel about the Soviet gulag.

Published: February 2, 2007

Not long ago, the London-based Russian novelist Zinovy Zinik speculated in the quarterly journal Kriticheskaya Massa on Western writers' fascination with "wicked Russia," concluding that it rested ultimately on envy: "For holding the wrong views in Russia you could be exiled to Siberia or executed, but the poet's status as a superior being who conversed with tsars (and accordingly possessed real political power) was never in question." In other words, the writer in Russia seems to count for something, whereas Western writers feel superfluous and marginalized. Zinik's observation was both apt and timely. Even as I write, Tom Stoppard's historical trilogy of plays, "The Coast of Utopia," about the intellectual precursors of the Russian Revolution (Bakunin, Belinsky, Stankevich, Herzen, Turgenev and so on), is playing to packed audiences in New York, and now Martin Amis has come along with a new novel about the phenomenon of the gulag and its consequences for post-communist Russia.

The novel in question, "House of Meetings," turns out to be a peculiar mixture of novelistic realism and historical exegesis, dressed up as a blood-and-guts memoir told in the first person by an unnamed survivor of the gulag. He is an anti-hero of heroic proportions, informing the reader early on that as a member of the Red Army he had "raped [his] way across what would soon be East Germany," blaming "history" for his excesses and provocatively demanding sympathy for his plight: "No animal is ever sadder than the rapist." Later, after being sentenced to a term in the gulag for "treason," he had killed informers with his bare hands, and physically fought off guards and criminals who were baiting his younger half-brother, Lev, a pacifist who improbably turned up in the same camp. After the two were freed, and after Lev had divorced his wife, Zoya, and died, our anti-hero had raped Zoya to satisfy a long deferred lust, then defected to the United States, where he found lucrative work as an aerospace engineer and married an American woman with a daughter called Venus.

These unsavory details emerge directly from the mouth of the narrator as he writes a long letter to Venus to explain his past life and the reasons for his pessimism. As the memoir opens, he is 84 years old, with not long to live (by the end he is dying of AIDS), and a passenger on a river steamer, making a tourist excursion to the site of the Siberian camp where he and Lev were incarcerated in the early 1950s. Among other things, he hopes to find the site of a camp building called the House of Meetings, where prisoners, including Lev, were allowed to enjoy a brief conjugal visit from their spouses. The narrator intersperses his account of Zoya's visit to Lev with snatches of family history and reveals that, when living in Moscow between the two world wars, he had been desperately in love with Zoya, but that she had astonished and frustrated him by marrying the wimpish Lev while the narrator was locked up in the gulag. At the center of the action, then, is a love triangle, the key to whose meaning lies in the details of Lev's gulag meeting with Zoya, which the narrator learns (by reading a letter from Lev) only in the penultimate chapter. Since his river journey takes place in 2004, it coincides with the notorious seizure of a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, by Chechen rebels, leading the narrator to compare the savage behavior of the hostage takers and security forces to the violence of earlier days.

Isabel Fonseca / Alfred A. Knopf Martin Amis has argued previously that the evils of Stalinism have yet to be fully absorbed.

Despite its love story and historical setting, the novel offers thin pickings in terms of human interest. The pairing of the two brothers, one a man of action and the other an indecisive intellectual, recalls some early works of Socialist Realism, while the voluptuous Zoya is little more than a projection of male fantasies. The description of Soviet everyday life bristles with improbabilities (two brothers in the same camp, windows wide open in November), and the narrator's supposed Americanness is undermined by a plethora of British idioms ("effing and blinding," "skivers and chancers," to name only two). Dialogue between the two brothers more often reflects the formality of a British drawing room than the raw vulgarity of the gulag.

All of which makes one wonder why on earth (other than for the reasons Zinik gives) the enfant terrible of English letters would decide to "go Russian," and why he would go to such lengths to revisit a life and a social system that have been so vividly and accurately dissected by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Yevgenia Ginzburg and innumerable other memoirists. Did he know, for instance, about the superb chapter on a house of meetings (dubbed "public house") in "Goodnight," the late masterpiece of Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky)? Why not simply refer readers to this rich existing literature instead of appropriating and trying to compete with it?

Two further reasons spring to mind after reading the novel. The first is perhaps obvious in the wake of Amis' book of essays on Josef Stalin, "Koba the Dread," where he expressed his conviction that the evils of the Soviet system still haven't been fully absorbed and understood. The Soviet nightmare, according to Amis, has been dismissed by an older generation and isn't even on the radar of the younger generation, so what better time to remind everyone of what exactly transpired in the name of socialist idealism, and at a length more palatable to an iPod-toting readership than the three vast volumes of Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" or the two volumes of Ginzburg's memoirs?

Less obvious but more striking is Amis' apparent desire to "translate" this dissident literature (and the Soviet experience behind it) into terms more easy to digest by young Western audiences. In this context, the Anglicisms and the solecisms don't matter, for they help, rather than hinder, the process of familiarization. The following passage, for example, could have been written by Solzhenitsyn, but not in this sort of language and terminology:

This was how power was distributed in our animal farm. At the top were the pigs -- the janitoriat of administrators and guards. Next came the urkas: designated as "socially friendly elements". ... Beneath the urkas were the snakes -- the informers and 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 enemies of the people, the politicals. Then you got the locusts, the juveniles. ... Finally, right down there in the dust were the shiteaters, the goners, the wicks. ...

You won't find shiteaters, snakes or leeches in existing translations of camp literature, nor references to George Orwell's pigs and "Animal Farm," but they clarify the gulag hierarchy for British and American readers in an idiomatic language that more truly reflects the world they describe than most translations do. Similarly, Amis brushes aside the euphemisms used by even the most outspoken dissidents to talk about the seamy side of camp life in favor of explicit terminology that leaves nothing to the imagination. In doing so he is correcting the last vestiges of censorship in 20th-century Russian literature -- not political censorship, of which the dissidents were free, but moral censorship or self-censorship, which reflected the norms of polite society, but involuntarily airbrushed the gulag experience and exaggerated the heroic at the expense of the sordid.

The only place where I would fault Amis in this regard is in his blanket condemnation of Russia during and since the Soviet era. His inclusion of the Beslan school massacre purports to show that Vladimir Putin's Russia is barely better than its Soviet predecessor, while the narrator's nihilistic bloodlust and sexual sadism are made to appear those of a Russian everyman. It's as bleak a picture of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia as one is likely to find in print today. Yet fascination and imitation suggest admiration. Amis' is a frustrated love of Russia. His bitter arraignment of Russia's tragic past and chaotic present suggests not hopelessness, but a desire for an awakening of Russia's moral conscience, and a search for a way back to contrition and redemption.

Michael Scammell is the author of "Solzhenitsyn, a Biography," and has just completed a biography of Arthur Koestler.

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