House of Meetings (Hardcover)

“You may live, but you won’t love,” reads a tattoo on the arm of one of Martin Amis’s gulag prisoners. Readers of his new novel may be surprised to learn that the dom svidanii, or house of meetings-a site of conjugal visits for gulag prisoners-actually existed in parts of the USSR’s network of forced-labour camps. Anne Applebaum wrote about it in her Pulitzer Prize winning Gulag: a History, in which she described it as a kind of purgatory between freedom and enslavement-a place where the desperate hopes of desperate people often crumbled under the pressures of the circumstances. Romantic love, and the ways in which it must have been cruelly subverted for so many people in Russia since 1917, is the theme of House of Meetings; the improbability of such noble sentiments surviving under the strains of Russia’s brutal political environment over the past century is also, in a sense, the book’s thesis.
The narrative comes to us in the form of an epistolary novel, a long suicide note from the book’s antihero-a Second World War veteran and Russian émigré. His story, a final message addressed to the daughter he adopted in America, is written as he journeys to the remains of the camp where he and his brother Lev laboured in the Stalin era. It begins:

Dear Venus,
If what they say is true, and my country is dying, then I think I may be able to tell them why. You see, kid, the conscience is a vital organ, and not an extra like the tonsils or the adenoids.

Venus, the last object of the narrator’s love-for once nonsexual-is on the receiving end of a former Soviet man’s tale of blood and bile, a nasty family saga unfolding against the backdrop of his country’s ailing conscience, and the decline of his own.
“In the first months of 1945,” he tells us, “I raped my way across what would soon be East Germany . . . in the rapist army, everybody raped. Even the colonels raped. And I raped too.” Returning from the war, he takes an interest in a nineteen-year-old Russian-Jewish beauty, Zoya. He raises her above the mass of women he has victimised. But their first kiss goes badly, and he relents, stunned:

“I, the decorated rapist, I who went through a woman a week using every form of flattery, false promises, bribery, and blackmail, not to mention the frank application of masculine bulk-I gave out a noise like the muffled coo of a pigeon, kissed her palm, and staggered out, seeming to twirl end over end all the way down the stairs.”

And his descent continues, for, as his florid language suggests, he considers himself an intellectual, and his careless obsession with a young Jewess during a time of anti-Jewish paranoia in the Soviet Union brings him under official scrutiny; he’s sentenced to ten years in the gulag.
Soon, his younger brother Lev suffers the same fate. Lev (who is made to look remarkably like Isaac Babel on the book’s cover) is a gentle, stuttering poet, and has, to his brother’s disbelief, married Zoya. Lev’s pacifist nature puts him at great risk in the camp, since he refuses to heed his brother’s advice to “find some murder” in his heart in order to survive. The elder brother commits a number of beatings and killings on the younger’s behalf, but Lev’s passivity and hard labour are rewarded some years after Stalin’s death; he is granted a night with Zoya in the house of meetings. The elder brother, we suspect, hopes the encounter will be the end of Lev and Zoya’s attachment, and, knowing how the place has affected other prisoners, warns the younger not to expect too much. After his night with Zoya, Lev offers his brother no details of the encounter.
Eventually, the men are released, and the family drama pushes through the Soviet decades, accounts of which are broken up by the narrator’s commentary on contemporary Russia, composed as he journeys north on a “gulag tour” which, he tells us, has “always lost money.” His confessions, and the preamble to his grand confession near the end of the book, are interrupted by his expressions of hatred for Russia and the whole “northern Eurasian plain”; his lengthy accounts of its brutalising influence on its people are intended to soften Venus’s reaction to her father-figure’s life and crimes.
As he receives news of the 2004 attack on a school in Beslan, he offers this comparison with another recent Russian horror:

“Early on in the siege of the Moscow theatre-Dubrovka-in 2002, the killers released some of the children. In North Ossetia you feel that, if anyone is going to be released, it will be the adults. And we remember how Dubrovka ended. With the best will in the world, the secret police did something that might have won greater obloquy elsewhere-in Kurdistan, for example. They gassed their own civilians. You were appalled, I remember, as were all Westerners; but here it was considered a broad success. Sitting at the breakfast table in Chicago, de-Russified and Anglophone and reading The New York Times, I even found myself murmuring, Mm. Not bad.”

On the conclusion of the Beslan debacle, he muses on the cruel spectacle, the predictable calamity that to his eyes is so typical of Russian disasters:

“So death comes at the moment of alleviation, of fractional alleviation-because the Russian totality can’t assent to that. The medical officials, after negotiation, are dealing with the dogs and the bodies when the bomb falls from the basketball hoop and the roof of the gym comes down. And if you were a killer, then this was your time. It is not given to many-the chance to shoot children in the back as they swerve in their underwear past rotting corpses.”

The obscenity of this scene is, for him, merely the continuation of a long chain of atrocities that continue to blight life in Russia. Meanwhile, he’s building up to a confession of his own, a variation on this same theme.
Lev adjusts badly to freedom. His marriage with Zoya disintegrates. He marries a meek young woman, outside of his circle of Moscow intellectuals, and they have a child. Our antiheroic narrator, meanwhile, has enriched himself in the nuclear technology sector and the black market, and bides his time to make another move on Zoya. And so, immediately after Lev’s death, he commits an act that seals his moral downfall: Zoya visits him in a state of grief and passes out in his hotel room, and he rapes her.
Russia is dying, our narrator assures us. Amis’s characters begin to leave the stage: Zoya jumps off a bridge onto the ice of the Moscow River. Artem, Lev’s son, is sent to war and dies in a massacre in Afghanistan’s Salang Tunnel. The moral of Amis’s tale is clear: The good have tried to be good, to love, to be loyal, and dutiful, and they have all perished. Only the villain survives to tell the story. The Russia he describes, as he heads to the remains of the old camp, is blighted by decline that is surreally exaggerated. In the northern villages near the old camp:

“Everyone is crashing and splashing around in the blood-coloured puddles infested with iron oxide, used syringes, used condoms, American candy-bar wrappers, and broken glass. They veer and yaw and teeter. And they just watch each other drop.”

In the same village, he encounters a bookseller’s kiosk:

“All she had for sale was surgical spirit and heaped paperbacks of a single genre. That’s all she was dealing in: The Myth of the Six Million, Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and sprit.”

The guilty Soviet man wanders through a post-Soviet netherworld, surrounded by the damned, who are crippled by intoxicants and extreme ideology.
His final judgment awaits him amid the ruins of the old camp. After picking through its remains, he tears open the envelope containing a letter left for him by Lev. He has left it unopened for fear of what it contains: the poet, the last good Russian man, gives his brother an account of the night in the house of meetings, describing how it has caused his decline. The letter also contains a withering warning about what his brother shouldn’t attempt with Zoya after his death.
Amis has treated the more brutal aspects of Soviet history before in Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, a nonfiction book, more literary than historical in tone, in which he confronted the gruesome excesses of Bolshevism and Stalinism, and challenged his late father Kingsley and friend Christopher Hitchens regarding their youthful Communist sympathies. The book drew sharp criticism from scholars like Anne Applebaum and Orlando Figes, in part because Amis was too selective in his historical focus, and because he juxtaposed some trivial aspects of his personal life (the crying of his young daughter, for example) with the suffering of Stalin’s victims, which had the effect of trivialising such suffering and subverting his own moral voice. One of the harshest assessments came from Hitchens, who wrote a scathing rebuttal in The Atlantic Monthly. He recently joked with a New Yorker interviewer that “Martin does not know the fucking difference between Bukharin and Bakunin.”
Nevertheless, Amis is not only a powerful and consistently inventive writer, but a formidable reader as well. Though he has never been to Russia, House of Meetings is built on extensive reading about the country. This makes the book highly enjoyable as a novel of ideas. But as a vision of Russia, it is distorted. Amis’s literary ventriloquism, his Russian villain’s self-exculpatory tale-after warming his heart in the virtuous West, he blames Russia’s wickedness for his own moral collapse-risks an incredulous reception from Russian readers. Indeed, if it were translated into Russian, readers would probably be insulted by it, given that Russia is a country where literature-and the opinions of foreign writers-are taken seriously.
I have lived in Russia, and it was apparent to me from the book’s opening that Amis isn’t offering an accurate portrayal of the country or its people. But the distortions he introduces nevertheless produce something interesting. House of Meetings works well as a composite of ideas. It is a dark Russian fantasy land, something that may have been inspired by what Vladimir Nabokov (a Russian émigré who looms gigantic in the Amis universe) would dream up from distant memories of his Russian childhood. Amis’s imaginary Russia is a fantasy that is based on other people’s stories. It is populated by the type of extraordinary individuals who have emerged from the country’s dark past as memoirists of Soviet life and as characters in Russian literature. House of Meetings owes much of its existence to the endurance and tenacity-and stunning literary talent-of a great many people who survived the cruelties of Soviet life. It also gives us a sense of how those works have shaped the image of Russia in the Western imagination.
Roland Brown (Books in Canada)

A unnamed former gulag inmate in Amis's disappointing latest is now a rich, 84-year-old expatriate Russian taking a tour of the former gulags in 2004. The narrator chronicles his current and past experiences in a book-length letter to his American "stepdaughter," Venus. Wry remarks on contemporary Russia and the U.S. run up against gulag reminiscences, which tell of the years 1948 through 1956, when the narrator and his brother Lev suffered in the Norlag concentration camp. The letter contains another letter, from the dying Lev, dated 1982, which was the year Lev's son Artem died in Afghanistan. Lev's first wife—and the narrator's first love—was Zoya, a Jewish Russian beauty who by 1982 was an alcoholic married to a Soviet apparatchik. The narrator's own feeling of debasement, when, after Lev's death, he finally meets Zoya again in Norlag's conjugal cabin (the House of Meetings), is complicated to the point of impaction. Amis's trademark riffs are all too muffled in his obvious research. And Venus, the narrator's supposedly beloved stepdaughter, is such a negative space filled with trite clichés about affluent young Americans, and such irritating second guesses about her reactions, that it lends a distinctly bullying tone to the book. (Jan.)
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