Books
Once upon a time in Norlag
by Mark Peters
The news isn’t all bad for Martin Amis fans.
British writer Will Self once observed, “Every writer under 45 would secretly like to be Martin Amis.” As would, it seems, in the light of 57-year-old Martin Amis’s novella House of Meetings, Martin Amis.
The Amis faithful may argue that the self-conscious language, the strained metaphors and rhetorical epigrams push the edge of the literary envelope with an Amisian vernacular of near abstraction. But in striving too hard for effect, clarity in this novella of two letters is often sacrificed for the sake of cadence. As a result, the prose tends to distance the reader, though Amis shoehorns this shortcoming into his Russian narrator’s character: “We were very late, you see, to develop a language of feeling.”
Forming the bulk of the narrative, the first letter is a confessional memoir from an ageing Russian émigré to his daughter Venus that begins during a Gulag tour to the Arctic Circle in 2004. Returning to Soviet slave-labour camp Norlag where he was incarcerated with his physically unattractive half-brother Lev, the unnamed narrator recalls that his younger brother’s crime was to have expressed admiration for the Americas.
The Americas, it turns out, is the brothers’ codename for Zoya, a free-spirited Jewish beauty whom both men fell in love with long before their incarceration. Given the Big-Brotherly nature of the surveillance state, there is much in the way of such codification. The brothers’ sister Kitty writes to them at the camp in “Aesopian language”.
Banned from writing back, Lev believes that the note on his file that says “Without the Right to Correspondence” is a code for immediate execution. The gulag’s internecine animal farm is stratified by a generalised hierarchy of pigs (a janitoriat of administrators and guards), urkas (virtual trusties divided into warring factions of brutes and bitches), snakes (informers), leeches (bourgeois fraudsters) and locusts (juveniles). At the bottom are the shiteaters and, further down, all-fours shiteaters.
At the heart of the story is the dismal hilltop chalet allocated for the purpose of conjugal visits. It is here that Lev is scheduled to consummate his marriage – which took place eight years before his internment at Norlag – to Zoya. For several decades the truth of what happened between them in the House of Meetings remains a closed book to the narrator. The second letter is, of course, a revelatory device – a “deus ex machina”, writes the unrequited (in love at least) old Russian. Having carried it as metaphoric emotional baggage for 25 years, the narrator tells his daughter that he intends to read it before he dies. In the end, though, it’s not so much the information intended “to encumber … to hobble” Lev’s sad and bitter brother that matters as much as the abstruse language evidently required in getting there.
What there is in the way of descriptive writing, of setting, of characters other than the two brothers, is sparse. “Re-Russifying” on his return to the slave labour camp, the narrator (and, by extension, the author) rationalises that inherited among his nation’s traits is “the thirst for abstract argument (abstract to the point of pretension)” and confesses to a worship of generalisations. The effect in reading House of Meetings is often like trying to pick up a second language on the trot.
If you haven’t memorised the metaphorical grammar en route, expect several I-don’t-get-it moments, such as: “I really got to know about the influenza of the xenophobe. It is a mirror the size of the Pacific – an ocean of inadequacies.” Even in context, it’s a head-scratcher.
Despite what might be inferred as a passing crisis of confidence (and in at least two interviews the author confesses as much), there are flashes of vintage Amis: “The factions had, at their disposal, a toolshop each, and this set the tone of their encounters: warm work with the spanner and the pliers, the handspike and the crowbar, vicings, awlings, lathings, manic jackhammerings, atrocious chisellings.”
Despite its shortcomings, House of Meetings has a lingering resonance and begs a second reading, though it’s likely only the faithful will make the effort. But as with poems, short stories, letters, rereading this epistolary has its own rewards. The I-don’t-get-it passages open up and the widening gyre of Amis’s humour proves sly, dry and luminous in the dark, carrying the promise that the best is yet to come.
HOUSE OF MEETINGS, by Martin Amis (Jonathan Cape, $45)
