House of Meetings
by Martin Amis
Jonathan Cape, HK$240
Of the literary novelists writing today, Martin Amis is probably the most scrutinised. Since making his name at the age of 25 with The Rachel Papers, a brashly written comic debut, Amis has received a level of public attention unusual for a writer whose prose is at times unabashedly convoluted.
Further successes, including 1989's Money, cemented his place as a populariser of the comic novel as an art form. But this rising profile saw Amis become an object of national fascination: spats with friends such as Julian Barnes, a failed marriage and even much publicised cosmetic dental surgery all made headlines in his native England. Amis' public figure soon overshadowed his writing and a chorus of critics responded to his last novel, 2003's Yellow Dog, with suggestions that his once formidable talent had been lost to his celebrity.
House of Meetings, a confessional memoir set in the Soviet Union, is an attempt to reclaim his reputation as Britain's most original author.
In this latest offering, Amis' unnamed narrator is an octogenarian Russian emigre, who spent 10 years as a political prisoner - arrested to fulfil a government quota - in a Soviet gulag in the Arctic Circle before leaving for the US on his release. The novel takes the form of a letter to his American stepdaughter, written on his first return to Russia in 2004. Set partly against the backdrop of the Beslan school massacre, the letter is an at times disjointed recollection of his violent gulag experience, the story of his and his brother's love for the same Jewish woman and musings on contemporary Russian society.