Fiction: Amis makes shrewd use of his narrator. By having him tell his story to his young American step-daughter, the narrator is constantly, understandably, having to explain.
One man deals with the twin burdens of his crimes, that of having sinned and even worse, that of having survived to tell the tale. The narrator of Martin Amis's magnificent new novel, House of Meetings, carries his guilt like a great, heaving sack. His story is his own, but it is also that of Russia, and most harrowingly, that of the cost of Stalinism, a price Russians had to pay "not by the spoonful or the shovelful, but by the dayful, the yearful, the lifeful".
Amis the stylist has always used language with a musician's grace, but never has he summoned such compelling force. This is a disciplined narrative in which every word is weighted with deliberation, and delivered in what he calls "old-style English English" with a sense of honour and gruff honesty that will leave the reader conscious of having experienced something of immense importance which is also, unexpectedly, disturbingly beautiful.
The novel begins with a letter. This proves significant as the narrative which is to follow is dominated by another letter, a letter that the narrator has held unopened for years, waiting for the moment to read it. Its existence festers until the closing pages.
The first letter though is addressed by the Russian narrator to his American step- daughter. "If what they say is true, and my country is dying, then I think I may be able to tell them why. You see, kid, the conscience is a vital organ, and not an extra like the tonsils or the adenoids."
From the beginning, Amis establishes a narrative voice which convinces. The tone is pitch perfect; regretful, bitter, edgy, brilliantly shaped by laconic asides, humour as black as coal and the occasional literary flourish permitted when writing one's epitaph. It is a human story, an account inspired by the narrator's awareness of running out of time.
So, after some years living in the US, an old Russian, aged 86, "vile-tempered and foul-mouthed," prepares to go home. For him, the notion of "home" has become distorted. There is only one home, the gulag work camp in Predposylov in the Russian Arctic to which he had been despatched after the war, a Red Army soldier turned political prisoner. The camp becomes a kind of training ground. Here the narrator, who had fought in 15 battles, refined his vicious survival skills, while his younger brother, Lev, his half brother by the same mother - a head teacher - but a different father, suffered but preserved his humanity. Amis draws on a heightened historic sensibility and evokes a starkly physical sense of life in the camp. All of the madness of the era, the bizarre Alice in Wonderland contradictions are articulated. "For us the camp was just one more war," recalls the narrator, "with one startling difference. We had fought the fascists - the enemy. Then the Russian state, now fascist itself, told us that we were the fascists, and that they were arresting us for it and enslaving us for it. Now we were the enemy, to be flung out over the shoulder of the world . . . What made this capsizal hard to forget was that my war wound throbbed in the cold from September to June. But I mustn't be self-pitying."
The narrator's reunion with his younger brother who arrived at the camp in 1948 is muted. "My brother Lev came to Norlag in February 1948 (I was already there) . . . He came at night. I recognised him instantly, in a crowd and at a distance, because a sibling . . 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."
This allows Amis to introduce a great deal of factual detail into the narrative without it appearing fact-laden.
Lev manages to make a furtive announcement. " 'Guess what happened to me', he said. I said, patiently, 'You got arrested'. 'No. Well, yes. But no. I got married'." All is well, until Lev reveals to whom. Zoya, a young Jewish girl, who had personified all that is sexual to the narrator, and her allure had persisted despite his record as a soldier hardened by habitual rape, had become his sister-in-law without his knowledge.
For all his wartime experiences, the one thing still capable of shocking the narrator happened. "I whispered it: Lev and Zoya got married. If I can survive that, then I'll never die." It is a powerful declaration of love from a narrator not given to parading his emotions.
The story is suspended between the events of the past and the old man's journey back to the camp, the accursed fraternal love triangle and the narrator's need to tell everything. History and life do battle. Amis directs this book with equal measures of intensity and inspiration. The narrative twists and unfolds, as does life.
Lev and Zoya part. Lev begins a new life. All the while the narrator imparts the information and also conveys his feelings, the emotions which he must stage-manage in order to disclose the final, shaming secret. It would take a JM Coetzee to match the intellectual and emotional restrained power of this novel. Amis has absorbed the horror of history and the agony of Russia in a wise, gut-wrenching story that sighs and breathes with an eloquently outraged sorrow.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
House of Meetings By Martin Amis Cape, 198pp. £15.99
