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Martin Amis
Jonathan Cape 2006
In this novel Martin Amis revisits the theme of sibling rivalry he explored in Success getting on for thirty years ago. This time though the setting is Russia and, drawing on the research he did for Koba the Dread, the camps of the Gulag. It’s not an easy read. The unnamed narrator tells the story in the form of a letter which he writes as he makes a sentimental journey back to the Arctic Circle fifty years on. Its main concern is his relationship with his brother, Lev, and his wife, Zoya. The central events happen in the slave camp where, in the 1950s, both men were interned for trumped up “thought crimes”. This, to me, is the most effective part of the novel, where Amis describes brutal indifferent cruelty unflinchingly. It’s very bleak: there are no contrived human kindnesses to lighten the darkness here. And afterwards, when the two men’s lives after the Gulag are described, it doesn’t get any better. Lev, the pacifist who has never betrayed his ideals leaves the house of meetings a hollow man, empty inside; his brother, the Second World War rapist and camp murderer prospers through black market dealings into a prosperous businessman, eventually making a fortune in America manufacturing prosthetic limbs for the victims of that country’s conflicts. The recent violence of the Beslan school siege and the Moscow opera hostage-taking also looms large. Amis’s writing is as tight and inventive as ever, and it is good to see his moving away from the linguistic pyrotechnics which made Yellow Dog for me virtually unreadable. However, this novel is hard work and, in its later stages, anything but involving. The little asides to the young American reader of the letter about the passing fads and fashions of speech and dress reminded me of what are, for me, his two best novels, Money and London Fields. I hope that some time soon Amis will again cast his satirical eye on events closer to home.
9th February 2007
http://www.martinamisweb.com/
See also: The Pregnant Widow ; The Second Plane; Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
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