HOUSE OF MEETINGS
by Martin Amis
Jonathan Cape ₤15.99, 208 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤12.79

In 2002 Martin Amis published Koba the Dread, a memoir-cum-history of Stalinism. The book closes with a letter to his father’s ghost, in which Amis tries to sum up the difference between his own work and that of Kingsley Amis: “You wrote... about the bourgeoisie in your fiction,” he says, “a category seldom seen in mine, where I make do with the aristocracy, the intelligentsia, the lumpenproletariat, and the urkas.”

The “urkas” are the Russian underclass, an extravagantly violent criminal caste given special privileges in the Soviet penal system, and this is a novel about them and the “epic agony of the gulag”.

It starts with the narrator returning from exile in the US. He is in the Russian Arctic on board a cruise ship named after Georgi Zhukov, the Soviet general under whom he had served against the Nazis. He is waiting to die. But first he must read a letter from his dead half-brother Lev that he has been hoarding, unread, for the past 20-odd years. The contents of Lev’s missive aren’t revealed until near the end of the book.

The narrator explains that we are about to read a triangular “love story”. This involves him, Lev and Lev’s wife Zoya, a mesmerisingly voluptuous Jewess who somehow avoids incarceration (or worse) during the anti-semitic purges after the war. Their story begins on July 31 1956, in the House of Meetings at Norlag, the prison camp in the Arctic Circle where Lev and his half-brother were sent as political prisoners.

House of Meetings was the name given to a block in the gulag reserved for conjugal visits - permitted as part of the relaxing of the penal regime after Stalin died in 1953. “Life was easy in 1956,” says the narrator; easy compared to the otherworldly depredations of the Soviet camps in the years between the end of the war and the death of “Joseph Vissarionovich” (he can’t bring himself to say “Stalin”).

It rapidly becomes clear that it’s those depredations, and not the putative love story, that really interest Amis. He is unflinchingly attentive to the gulag’s squalor - these are the most powerful pages in the book. But they are also the most perplexing. Why has Amis chosen to recreate in fictional form a picture that he originally fashioned in Koba?

Amis has done his research. Indeed, House of Meetings has the kind of acknowledgments page more commonly found in an academic monograph. In it Amis discharges his debts to the historians and memoirists of the gulag, notably to Janusz Bardach, a survivor of the camps whose book Man is Wolf to Man he discussed in Koba.

At one point, when they’re both in the camp, the narrator tells Lev, “here, man is wolf to man”. And when Lev is sent to the “isolator” after being denounced by a fellow prisoner, we see him “crouched on a bench above knee-deep bilge” - just as, in Amis’s earlier book, Bardach is described perched on a bench above the “bilgey sewage” on the floor of the cell.

The effect of this and other borrowings or repetitions is that House of Meetings feels inauthentic. Amis has his narrator describe the “pigs”, the Soviet equivalent of the kapos in the Nazi camps, as comprising a “janitoriat”, a coinage first aired in Koba. It is as if Amis was so pleased with that formulation he had to help himself to it again here. Perhaps a more fitting way to honour Bardach’s “ghost” - which he says “greatly sustained him” when he wrote House of Meetings - would have been to stay silent.

One wonders whether Kingsley Amis might have come to the same conclusion. “Nobody,” he once said, “thinks that fiction should be able to discuss everything; [Martin] thinks he can do it, but I wonder if he can.”