The American Spectator

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Below the waterline, where the staff and crew slumber and carouse, the ship is of course a fetid ruin -- but look at the dining room, with its honey-gold drapes, its brothelly red velvets. And our load is light. I have a four-berth cabin all to myself. The Gulag Tour, so the purser tells me, never quite caught on...Moscow is impressive -- grimly fantastic on its pelf. And Petersburg, too, no doubt, after its billion-dollar birthday: a tercentenary for the slave-built city "stolen from the sea." It's everywhere else that is now below the waterline.

br> The Gulag Tour takes our narrator to the Arctic Circle, far from the glitzy cultural and political capitals of Russia. Here, below the waterline, he views his old camp, tours the run-down city of Dudinka, keeps abreast of the ongoing siege at a certain middle school in Beslan, North Ossetia, and continues writing his memoirs for his daughter. p>Amis's prose is impeccable as always. Describing the perimeter defenses of his work camp, the narrator writes of br> /p>

The watchtowers -- their averted searchlights and their domes like army helmets with a spray of gun barrels set under the peak, at right angles, like scurvied teeth...

br> The protagonist himself is a classic Amis literary construction: a tormented Soviet infantryman who raped his way across Eastern Europe before being sent to a work camp, whereupon he resorts to brutal measures to stay alive, killing three individuals. After his release he becomes an engineer, but the moral consequences of his past are profound. "Whatever the war did," the old man writes, "camp trapped it inside you." Thus he, like the rest of Russia, became morally deformed. "I think there must have been a developmental requirement that Russia simply failed to meet," he opines. "Russia learned how to crawl, and she learned how to run. But she never learned how to walk."

House of Meetings is not devoid of flaws. The narrative is disrupted by didactic asides and explanatory footnotes for references to historical personages. Amis tries to justify these by casting his narrator as a man with "a weakness for pedagogy," and certainly the information will be of great service to readers who are not well versed in Russian history, but the effect can occasionally seem clumsy. Additionally, Amis's novel is very much the product of his research for Koba the Dread, and many passages are clearly informed by secondary material. Readers familiar with Anne Applebaum's magisterial Gulag: A History will often find themselves experiencing deja vu. Likewise the narrator's trip to Dudinsk suggests a similar trip made by the journalist Andrew Meier in his Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall. (Amis thanks both Appelbaum and Meier in the Acknowledgements.) There is no shame in this, of course, and Amis's talent as a prose stylist outweighs the largely derivative nature of his raw material. As a result, the balance sheet for House of Meetings ends largely in credit to Amis.

Vladimir Putin's Russia, with its brazen geopolitical posturing and obvious domestic insecurity, is as baffling to outsiders as it was at the time of the Elizabethan Giles Fletcher's mission, as combustible as it was to Custine, and as ferocious as Conrad described. Amis joins his predecessors in the perspicacity of his Western eyes. Although his interest in the catastrophic moral and social effects of Stalinism may seem belated to many, it has certainly borne fruit in his treatment of contemporary Russia. Amis' conclusion, delivered to us via his octogenarian narrator, is that "The conscience, I suspect, is a vital organ. And when it goes, you go." Armed with this seemingly simple aphorism, we may go a long way in understanding Russia's current predicament (both above and below the waterline), and a great deal more besides.

topics:
Vladimir Putin, Law, Russia, NATO, Communism, Oil