Confronting death in an age of `horrorisrn'

If Martin Amis wants to be considered Britain's leading novelist then he is going to have to start delivering some first-rate fiction, says Matt Thorne
House of Meetings by Martin Amis, Jonathan Cape £15.99
when Martin Amis received bad reviews for his last novel, Yellow Dog, he responded by saying: "What they don't like is that, to them, my stuff now is like a drone of superiority." He was right about the droning, if not the superiority.
What Amis fails to realise is that if he is going to position himself as the best writer in Britain, he needs to deliver first-rate fiction.
It wouldn't take much to rehabilitate Amis: a decent film of one of his better books should do the trick (David Cronenberg's version of London Fields and Nicholas Roeg's adaptation of Night Train are both reportedly in the works).
Yellow Dog was a toxic book: it retroactively contaminated his whole oeuvre, and many long-time Amis admirers are now unable to read his early books without seeing how his literary style would lead to this later disaster.
House of Meetings, though dull, at least feels like something of a fresh start: an attempt to extricate himself from some of the horrors of his recent work and remind his readers of his still considerable talent.
Presumably inspired by his research for his nonfiction book about Stalin, Koba the Dread, House of Meetings is set in a USSR slave camp during the 1950s.
The book is narrated by an elderly Russian man and this new narrative voice allows Amis to get closer than ever before to blending the styles of his two favourite authors, Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov. The latter gets a name-check from the narrator when he borrows an image from him.
As usual with Amis, he brings the horror of his character's conditions to life via sexual observations: the historical context of rape as a war crime, and unpleasant detail about which sexual activities were most practised in the camp, and in what manner.
There are also several unedifying scenes involving bodily functions which I shan't go into here.
The narrator addresses his story to a young "Venus", his stepdaughter, a modem woman whom he imagines recoiling three times a paragraph: "And it isn't just the unvarying morbidity of my theme, and my generally poor performance, which is due to deteriorate still further. No, I mean my readiness to assert and conclude — my appetite for generalisations. Your crowd, they're so terrorstrickeu by generalisations that they can't even make a declarative sentence."
There is something touching in this, a sense that as the character is trying to make peace with his reader, Amis is simultaneously begging tolerance from his critics. Of course, he's doing it in his usual self-aggrandising way, but there is an unusual fragility here.
This is underscored by the physical decrepitude of his aging protagonist. Amis has always been unflinching about the biological honors of the male body, presumably inspired by the shortcomings of his own (and lest this sound unnecessarily cruel, he has often addressed this subject in his journalism and it remains a central subtext of most of his novels), and here he ups the stakes considerably by having a narrator in "the high eighties". As with Money, this novel is a suicide note.
The narrator admits that he is most frightened not by the reality of death, but the fear of what his life is going to add up to, a concern that chimes with Amis's belief that when it comes to critical appraisal, "the real action starts with your obituaries". Amis is, of course, in an unusual situation in this regard as he has been able to see the posthumous critical evaluation of his father.
The author's interest in astrophysics and cosmology, most vividly explored in London Fields and Night Train, resurfaces here, with the narrator drawing parallels between Russia's bureaucracy and our galaxy's "dark matter".
Along with this 200-page novella, House of Meetings was originally going to include two short stories, "The Last Days of Mohammad Ana", instead published in the New Yorker and the Observer, which concerned the days preceding 9/11 from the perspective of a terrorist involved in the attack, and "In The Palace of the End", about a bodydouble for a Middle Eastern tyrant. It is not clear why these stories have been removed, but the book would have been stronger with their inclusion.
Amis coined the term Yhorrorism" in ellow Dog, and has recently re-used it to describe the current age in a long essay for the Observer, and his recent writings have suggested an attempt to understand the problems of the 21st century by examining the darker moments of the 20th.
Taken alone, the novella loses some of its relevance (although it is not purely historical: the narrator connects events in the slave camp with the 2002 siege of a Moscow theatre, and hiphop fashion with prison camp dress) and it seems unlikely that this will be remembered as an important part of Arnis's oeuvre.
Instead, it works best as a long fictional appendix to Koba the Dread, or as an apology for Yellow Dog.
The novel only really comes together in its final chapter, in which the theme of fraternal jealousy fully emerges. Amis tries to marry his observation of lives constrained by the horrors of the slave camps with the restrictions of familial or erotic bonds, but the required sense of tragedy feels absent, mainly because the narrator is as repellent as he fears.
Amis has already trailed his next book, The Pregnant Widow, rumoured to include real figures such as Kingsley Amis, Saul Bellow and Philip Larkin. This seems another dramatic change, and if he can revitalise tired postmodernist devices he may yet trigger his rehabilitation proper.