The evolution of a monster in a portrait of Soviet life

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HOUSE OF MEETINGS

By Martin Amis

Knopf, $23, 256 pages

REVIEWED BY SUDIP BOSE

In an essay on "The Golovlyov Family" by the Russian writer Shchedrin, the eminent V.S. Pritchett wrote: "Certainly the characters are all wretched or unpleasant, and the reader of novels who professes that strange but common . . . attitude to literature: 'Would I like to meet these people?' must leave the book alone." And yet, Pritchett argued, Shchedrin's book is not "the gloomiest of the Russian novels," but rather a work of such power and severe realism that by its end, "we are moved beyond description."

Can the same thing be said of "House of Meetings," Martin Amis' new novel, set mainly in Soviet Russia? Without question, its principal character is as wretched a creature as one can imagine, a former member of the Soviet army during World War II who is prone to amoral violence and misogyny. But does Mr. Amis' gritty, hardened portrait of Soviet life touch us the way a Yevtushenko poem or a Shostakovich symphony does? The answer depends, I think, on how convincing is the Russian voice of this accomplished English novelist.

The book begins in the present day, with the unnamed narrator traveling near the Arctic Circle, en route to the gulag where he was enslaved some 50 years ago. He is close to death now and is, by his own admission, "a vile-tempered and foul-mouthed old man." As he sets down his memoirs, jumping between present and past, we see what is essentially the evolution of a monster.

What else can we call a man capable of this bit of cool, anti-heroic self-analysis: "My dealings with women, I concede, were ruthless and shameless and faithless, and solipsistic to the point of malevolence. My behavior is perhaps easily explained; in the first three months of 1945, I raped my way across what would soon be East Germany."

Those horrors are a mere prelude to the events he will soon describe: his experiences at the Norlag work camp, above the 69th parallel. Here in the notorious slave archipelago, he is cast among lowlifes and intellectuals, thugs and political prisoners, criminals and dissidents, all trying to survive amid brutal, subhuman conditions. As in any society, there is hierarchy here, though at Norlag the lawlessness establishes a pecking order in which the criminals dominate the "educated," "cultivated men," who eat "slops on their hands and knees." Violence is the lingua franca of this camp; beatings and death are the business of the day.