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Executive Times |
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2007 Book Reviews |
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House of
Meetings by Martin Amis |
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Rating: |
** |
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(Mildly Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Grim In his
latest novel, House of
Meetings, Martin Amis presents life in a Soviet slave labor camp from the
mid 1940s to the mid 1950s. The tormented narrator reflects on his life,
especially in the gulag, his relationship with his younger brother, Lev, who
was also in the camp, and Zoya, whom the narrator loved, but who married Lev.
The novel is an exploration of evil, and the disintegration of the individual
and the state. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 3, “The War
Between the Brutes and the Bitches,” pp. 26-29: My brother Lev came
to Norlag in February 1948 (I was already there), at the height of the war
between the brutes and the bitches. He came at night. I recognized him
instantly, in a crowd and at a distance, because a sibling, Venus, far more
tellingly than a child, displaces a fixed amount of air. A child grows, while
its parent remains static in space. With brothers it is always the same
difference. I was having a
smoke with Semyon and Johnreed on the roof of the cement works, and I saw Lev
filing into the disinfection block, which stood foolishly exposed by its
great battery of encaged lightbulbs. Forty minutes later he filed into the
yard. He was naked but for the catsuit of thick white ointment they hosed you
down with, for the purgation of small vermin; the caustic fire it generated
on the surface of the skin did nothing to ease the galvanic shivering caused
by thirty degrees of frost. He stumbled (he was nightblind), and went down on
all fours, and the cold really took him: he looked like a hairless dog trying
to shake itself dry. Then he got to his feet and stood there, holding something
in his cupped hands—something precious. I kept back. This was the year
when the tutelary powers lost their hold on the monopoly of violence. It was
a time of spasm savagery, with brute going at bitch and bitch going at brute.
The factions had, at their disposal, a toolshop each, and this set the tone
of their encounters: warm work with the spanner and the pliers, the
handspike and the crowbar, vicings, awlings, lathings, manic jackhammerings,
atrocious chiselings. Even as Lev jogged across the yard to the infirmary,
there came through the mist the ear-hurting screams from the entrance to the
toy factory, where two brutes (we later learned) were being castrated by a
gang of bitches armed with whipsaws, in retaliation for a blinding earlier
that day. The war between the
brutes and the bitches was a civil war, because the brutes and the bitches
were, alike, urkas. A social substratum of hereditary criminals, the urkas
had been in existence for centuries—but invisibly They were fugitive in both
senses: on the run, and quick to disappear. Outside in the land of freedom
you would glimpse them rarely, and with callow wonder, as a child glimpses
the half-hidden figures in the wings at a circus or a fairground: a world of
Siamese twins and mermen and bearded ladies, of monstrous tattoos and
scarifications, a world of coded chaos. You could hear them, too, sometimes: in a This was how power
was distributed in our animal farm. At the top were the pigs—the janitoriat of administrators and guards. Next came the urkas: designated as “socially
friendly elements,” they had the status of trusties who, moreover, did no
work. Beneath the urkas were the snakes—
the informers, the one-in-tens—and beneath the snakes were the leeches, bourgeois fraudsters
(counterfeiters and embezzlers and the like). Close to the bottom of the pyramid
came the fascists, the counters,
the fifty-eighters, the enemies of the people, the politicals. Then you got
the locusts, the juveniles, the
little calibans: by-blows of revolution, displacement, and terror, they were
the feral orphans of the Soviet experiment. Without their nonsensical laws
and protocols, the urkas would have been just like the locusts, only bigger.
The locusts had no norms at all. Finally, right down
there in the dust were the shiteaters, the
goners, the wicks; they couldn’t work anymore, and they could no longer bear
the pains of hunger, so they feebly brawled over the stops and the garbage.
Like my brother, I was a “socially hostile element,” a political, a fascist.
Needless to say, I was not a fascist. I was a Communist. And a Communist I
remained until the early afternoon of August 1, 1956. There were also animals, real animals, in our animal farm. Dogs. The
urka civil war was a consequence of Venus.
Remember how disappointed you were by the crocodiles in the reptile house at
the zoo—because “the lizards never moved”? Imagine that hibernatory quiet,
that noisome stasis. Then comes a whiplash, a convulsion of fantastic
instantaneity; and after half a second one of the crocodiles is over in the
corner, rigid and half-dead with shock, and missing its upper jaw. That was the war between the brutes
and the bitches. Now, when I talk,
here and elsewhere, of In
much of life, we have no idea at a moment in time, of what is going on. Amis
capitalizes on that in House of
Meetings, and takes readers through an assessment of morality that is
grim to read and sad to reflect on. Amis’ writing is superb, but after
closing the last page, I felt like some of the evil on the page had entered
me. Steve
Hopkins, September 25, 2007 |
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Go to Executive Times Archives |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the October 2007 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/House of Meetings.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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