Amis, M., 2006. House of Meetings. London: Jonathan Cape. (ISBN: 0-224-07609-4). Price £15.99 (hardcover). 208 pp.
Reviewed by Darya Protopopova (New College, Oxford)
'Martin Amis and His Bodyguards'
'A generalisation might sound like an attempt to stereotype - and we can't have that. I'm at the other end. I worship generalisations. And the more sweeping the better. I am ready to kill for sweeping generalisations.' Thus Amis protects himself from foreseeable criticism of the 'sweeping generalisations' constituting his book. His narrator is a Russian survivor of the Second World War, a concentration camp and - what appears even more painful to him - his lover's marriage to his brother. This narrator's generalisations, the examples of which will be quoted below, are surely justifiable. The narrator's, but not the author's.
Here comes the trick Amis uses in many of his novels. He creates the narrator's persona which the reader tends to identify with Amis himself - quite understandably, for Amis' narrators are intelligent people composing written accounts of their lives. In this and other aspects, House of Meetings resembles, for example, London Fields. Amis allows his narrators to come up with all possible deeds and thoughts, and when the critic exclaims, 'But you just can't say that, Mr Amis!', he smiles, shakes his head and points to the narrator standing by his side, 'It's not me, it's him.'
In House of Meetings Amis distances himself from the narrator by footnoting his narrator's 'memoirs'. For example, 'Life was easy, in 1956... Joseph Vissarionovich was dead, Beria had fallen, and Nikita Sergeyevich had made the Secret Speech.' Amis's footnote: 'Joseph Vissarionovich is Stalin... I see no way around these footnotes. It would have cost the memoirist his soul, I think, to write out the word Stalin.' Now, who is this person commenting on the narrator's words? Is it Amis the author, or is it another intermediary persona that serves Amis as a fictional editor of the narrator's email to his Western daughter (for this is the form in which the novel is written)? Whoever is speaking in the footnote, he is mistaken: it would have cost the narrator his soul to write out the words 'Joseph Vissarionovich', rather than 'Stalin'. A combination of Christian name and patronymic does not 'establish distance' in Russian, but is an expression of respectful familiarity. 'Joseph Vissarionovich' - this is how a favoured employee would address his amiable employer: it is impossible to imagine a survivor of the concentration camp referring to Stalin in these terms. Amis the author, with his linguistic awareness, would surely have known this, so it must be the fault of his intermediary...
My comment might seem irrelevant to the novel written in English, but here I reach the central reason why criticism of House of Meetings is almost impossible. The narrator is Russian, deliberately telling his story in a language foreign to him: in his memoirs, he is 'not being Russian'; he is 'being "English" '. 'I must just say that it does feel consistently euphemistic - telling my story in English, and in old-style English English, what's more.' The survivor of Stalin's slave camp, telling his story in English, while his eyes start 'being Eastern' - what does Amis need this linguistic and cultural masquerade for? Obviously, it disarms his critics and precipitates any comments on stylistic oddities of the novel. For instance, a new janitor is introduced to a group of the camp's captives: 'We have a distinguished visitor. Gentlemen? Meet Comrade Uglik.' 'Gentlemen'? So, this is how the captives address each other - the captives described throughout the novel as 'shiteaters', crushers of each other's bones, starved inhabitants of Stalin's denigrating hell? If this was meant as sarcastic witticism, reminiscent of aristocratic nineteenth-century manners, I am doubtful about the plausibility of its surfacing in the conversation of declassified and dehumanized creatures who populate the camp in Amis's novel. The critic turns in bewilderment to the author, but is silenced by the latter's bodyguard, the narrator who is just 'being "English".'
The narrator's persona shields Amis not only from critique of purely artistic qualities of his novel; more importantly, it serves him as a convenient mouthpiece for his personal political views. House of Meetings is a fusion of journalism and fiction. In his narrator's account of a 'remembrance cruise' down the Yenisei River, Amis inserts TV coverage of the terrorist attack on Middle School Number One in Beslan. Images of the killers 'in their black balaclavas' shooting 'children in the back as they swerve in their underwear past rotting corpses', are frighteningly too real to fit into a fictional narrative; in their light, the rest of the story, in spite of its background of Stalin's slave camps, fades into the superfluous belles-lettres.
Amis allows his narrator to comment freely on the siege of the school: 'Middle School Number One is like a laboratory and a control experiment. It is showing how you build the Russian totality.' 'Every Russian I talk to, without exception, tells me that Middle School Number One is the work of the government... For reasons of state, we need something that will strengthen national support for the war on our south-eastern border.' At the end of his book, Amis names the sources from which he derived his descriptions of Stalin's slave camp (surprisingly, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is not one of them); for his statements about the recent terrorist attacks in Russia, he does not give any supporting references. One might object here and say that this is, after all, fiction, and the author does not need 'supporting references' throughout. However, if this is fiction, why does Amis present the 'Soviet' part of his novel in the non-fictional wrapper of footnotes and bibliography, leaving the 'Modern Russia' part nakedly realistic and imaginary at the same time? He obviously wants the reader to take the 'Modern Russia' part as seriously as the based-on-documentary-sources description of the Soviet atrocities. In the present-day part of House of Meetings, Amis's main support is, again, his Russian narrator: surely, the survivor of Stalin's slave camp is a trustworthy commentator on Russian politics.
But is the narrator Russian? Does his character do justice to the memory of those multitudes of victims of the Soviet totalitarianism? He starts his memoirs saying, 'It's not the USSR I don't like. What I don't like is the northern Eurasian plain... I don't like the multi-ethnic, twelve-time-zone land empire.' His last words are, 'Russia is dying. And I'm glad.' Those who know real testimonies of Stalin's victims - among whom Anna Akhmatova, Eugenia Ginzburg, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - those will know that Amis got his narrator's accents wrong. It is the 'USSR', the antihuman political institutions that these victims 'didn't like'. But for Russia and its people they never lost their love: it is for Russia and her future they sacrificed their lives. If this may look as yet another generalisation, for it, at least, we have supporting confessions of the Soviet victims themselves. In February 1937, foreseeing his arrest and death at the concentration camp, Osip Mandelstam writes,
O guttural Urals, broad-shouldered lands of the Volga,
wide plains facing me - all my rights are there,
and I must still fill my lungs with them. (trans. Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin)
Akhmatova, whose first husband, Nikolai Gumilev, was shot by the Bolsheviks and whose son Lev Gumilev spent 18 years in prison and prison camps, writes in Requiem:
And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed
Under the crunch of bloodstained boots. (trans. Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward)
Amis's narrator is not Russian. Neither is he English. He is a fake, a ghost, a badly conceived literary cliché. For nothing, not even the memories of Stalin's camp nor the fear of being killed by government agents, would induce true children of the 'multi-ethnic, twelve-time-zone land empire' to wish their motherland's death.
This major false note makes Amis's masque of the Russian narrator vanish into thin air. The author's own voice becomes discernible in the controversial statements with which House of Meetings is brimming. 'In the postwar years, there were no non-swallowers in the Soviet Union. None.' 'There was never [Amis's italics] any soap in the USSR.' I let these statements pass, for their questionable accuracy does not vitally affect contemporary Russian people. But when I come to Amis's statements about the siege of the school in Beslan, I cannot let them pass. Because the question is no longer whether they are true or not, whether it was the government's, the terrorists' or someone else's 'work'. The question is whether such statements provoke nothing but hostility among common members of different nations, distracting the reader's attention from real grief of fellow human beings. One wonders only why Amis wants his reader to overlook human tragedy behind the cynicism of journalistic discourse. Perhaps the answer is simple: one writes journalism faster and sells it better than authentic literary representations of human tragedy.
I have known Amis as a unique writer, a true 'lord of language'. House of Meetings bears a touch of Amis the artist: 'As I ducked out of the shed... I saw something I hadn't noticed... It was a test tube, with rounded base, kept upright by a hand-carved wooden frame. A single stemless wild-flower 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.' This artistic touch is lost, however, in the vapours of non-fictional political sensationalism. In House of Meetings, it is a great shame to see Amis the artist adopting the role of a mass-media provocateur.