Oh Martin, what can I say?

Of course, the trouble with Christmas books is that sometimes you get expensive hardcovers that you don't like all that much.

I read Martin Amis's House of Meetings last week. It has a very attractive cover. But the insides look more like this photo of Mr Amis.


(I love this photo.)

As I've said before, I'm rather fond of Martin Amis, even though it's not a very rewarding relationship. In this book, he's tries to be as clever as usual but the protagonist is a shambling, sentimental Russian giant whose better impulses make him repent his former misdeeds and the cleverness comes off as a sort of defensiveness, as if he's hiding behind the careful prose.

The book is narrated by an octogenarian former gulag inhabitant made good in the US. He's writing a valediction to a much (if problematically) loved American stepdaughter from a cruise to the sites of the former gulag. This gives Amis the chance to explain everything that happened in Russia since the War and talk about the gulags and how life in the US is very different. In short, the gulags were terrible and brutal. He kept his wimpish half brother alive through the horrors even though the brother was a pacifist and had married the one woman he himself really wanted. Oh, and it's very cold in the Artic circle and Russians drink far far too much and have a bad history of persecuting Jews and using secret informers to denounce people. And former prisoners found it difficult in Soviet Russia if they didn't bribe anyone for a rehabilitation certificate. And crimes change people, even if people do them solely to save their own lives. And you can't make people love you. And invading Afghanistan was a mistake. Um, oh and America is a different country.

Amis's books provoke lots of strong criticism - I vaguely remember his Yellow Dog making it onto several "worst book" lists. While trying to sort out my own reactions to the book, I ploughed through Daniel Soar's "Bile, Blood, Bilge and Mulch" in the London Review of Books.* Soar's excellently-titled article compares Amis's novel with his recent non-fiction book called Korba the Dread and shows how the same sources are used in different ways. Soar doesn't think the book works because Amis tries to give characters hearts and he doesn't have one himself (awww!). I don't actually agree but it's an easy enough conclusion to draw.

I was also surprised to realise that Amis is 59. FIFTY-NINE! And he was only a Wunderkind a decade or so ago!

Anyway, the next entry will be back in the land of Faerie.

*There are heaps of other reviews here.