House of Meetings
by Martin Amis
(Knopf, 256 pages, $23)
After Martin Amis, the renowned but polarizing English writer,
tackled the issue of Stalinism and its moral legacy in his
non-fiction work Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty
Million, it was only a matter of time before the same
historical and emotional terrain was trod in novelistic form. This
has happened in House of Meetings, in which depictions of
the personal and political consequences of the Gulag slave
archipelago combine to form a work of unsettling moral power.
House of Meetings is at its core the story of a love
triangle (an “isosceles,” Amis tells us, “it certainly comes to a
sharp point”) involving two brothers and a Jewish girl in a
post-WWII Moscow on the verge of a pogrom. But Amis’s latest
offering is also a profoundly political work, concerned with the
impact of Communism on today’s Russia, both on the level of the
individual and the state. As such, Amis is a worthy heir of a long
tradition of Western eyes trained on Russia.
Russia has always had the power to alternately enthrall and
terrify outside observers. As far back as 1588, Giles Fletcher, one
of the first English envoys to Moscow, reported back to London on
the “baffling, beautiful, and bizarre” country and remarked on the
unparalleled autocratic nature of the tsarist regime. In 1843, the
French Marquis de Custine’s Letters from Russia told of a
nation
where there is no freedom, there is no soul and no
truth. Russia is a lifeless corpse, a colossus surviving in its
head while all its limbs, equally deprived of strength, wither and
perish….Russia is a tightly sealed boiler on a mounting fire: I
fear an explosion.
The novelist Joseph Conrad, born in Polish Russia, explored similar
themes in his novel
Under Western Eyes, and after the
Revolution noted that
The ferocity and imbecility of an autocratic rule
rejecting all legality and in fact basing itself upon complete
moral anarchism provokes the no less imbecile and atrocious answer
of a purely Utopian revolutionism encompassing destruction by the
first mean to hand, in the strange conviction that a fundamental
change of hearts must follow the downfall of any given human
institutions.
It is certainly platitudinous to say that in Russia the more things
change, the more they stay the same, but that makes it no less
true.
Mutatis mutandis, Amis is exploring the same issues
that Custine and Conrad were in previous centuries, and Amis is no
doubt aware of this —
House of Meetings features at least
seven references to
Under Western Eyes or Joseph Conrad.
Amis’s novel, which takes the form of a Russian man in his late
eighties writing a letter to his American-born daughter, begins and
ends with the assertion that his country is dying. Russia, after
all, has a new cross to bear. On the narrator’s computer is the
“Russian cross,” “the graph with its two crinkly lines
intersecting, one pink, one blue. The birth rate, the death rate.”
Here, Amis channels Mark Steyn when he writes that “On the larger
scale, destiny is demographics; and demographics is a monster.”
Our un-named narrator has returned to Russia, from which he
emigrated in the 1980s, to see the slave camp in which he was
interned in the Forties and Fifties. On the “Gulag Tour,” he boards
a river boat (the Georgi Zhukov) which becomes a metaphor
for contemporary Russia:
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.
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.
Amis’s prose is impeccable as always. Describing the perimeter
defenses of his work camp, the narrator writes of
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…
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.
